The astonishing American war on Mormonism reveals the shallowness of the nineteenth-century commitment to religious freedom.

At one point in 2012, both the Democratic leader of the United States Senate and the Republican presidential nominee were Mormons. So were five other senators and eight congressmen. Globally, in 2018 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called the LDS Church, was the faith of some 16 million people, including 163,000 in Nigeria, 765,000 in the Philippines, 1.4 million in Mexico, and 151,000 in Australia. Mormonism is a significant world religion, slightly bigger than Judaism.

It might seem embarrassing for America, then, that Joseph Smith, the founder of this respectable world religion, was murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois. Local residents passed a formal resolution in 1844 stating that if “the prophet and his miscreant adherents” did not surrender, “a war of extermination should be waged to the entire destruction, if necessary for our protection, of his adherents.”

They kept their word. As Smith sat in Carthage’s jail on June 27, 1844, about 125 men emerged single file from the woods. Several broke down the door and shot Smith’s brother Hyrum in the face. As Joseph Smith scrambled away, they shot him in the back, causing him to fall out of a nearby window. He landed on the ground in front of a crowd of bayonet-wielding militiamen whose faces were smeared with mud. Seeing that he was still alive, one of them propped him up against a wall. His colleagues then fired several more rounds into his chest.

Those accused (but acquitted) of Smith’s murder included a newspaper publisher, a state senator, the captain of a local militia, a future member of Congress, and a respected Baptist minister. The killing took place with the possible acquiescence of the governor of Illinois (who had pledged to protect Smith), less than six years after the governor of Missouri had threatened to exterminate the Mormons and had succeeded in driving them from his state.

It is hard today to fathom how loathed Mormons were by mainstream Christians. They were regarded as foreign (many were immigrants), heretical (they crafted an entirely new version of the Bible), threatening (they grew rapidly and asserted themselves aggressively), and, in most American minds, perverted (they practiced polygamy). The early days of the LDS Church include some of the most brutal religious persecution in American history. Church members were massacred, attacked by the United States Army, and spurned by the United States Supreme Court.

To be clear, theirs is not a morally tidy story of a humble community of believers wanting nothing more than to be peaceably accepted into the American mainstream. The Mormons often refused to accept certain American values, such as monogamous marriage, private property, and the separation of church and state. But their brave defiance challenged eighteenth-century notions of religious freedom.

This chapter describes the rise of this entrepreneurial new religion, its breathtaking persecution, its adaptation, and its ultimate acceptance by the mainstream. The Mormon story demonstrates both the ability of the American system to cultivate piety and innovation and the extent to which the country hadn’t yet bought into the founders’ vision. When confronted with an unapologetically out-of-the-mainstream sect, Americans revealed a relatively shallow commitment to religious liberty. In the end, however, the conflicts with the Mormons did advance freedom as their rising political clout—and their courage—forced the Protestant majority to recalibrate their approaches to minority religions.

 

An American Faith Rises

Mormonism began in 1820 in the woods outside Palmyra, New York, some twenty-five miles east of Rochester. As he later told the story, the fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith was walking near his home, pondering his own “wickedness and abominations” as well as “the darkness which pervaded all mankind.” Suddenly a pillar of brilliant light came down from the sky and he saw God and Jesus. Smith asked which religious sect he should follow, and Jesus responded that he “must join none of them, for they were all wrong.”

About three years later, in 1823, Smith was visited by another spirit, who called himself Moroni. He told Smith that a sacred book inscribed on gold plates, which had been buried, told a very different story about Jesus and a lost tribe of Israel from what was in the gospels. Three years after that, Smith dug up the plates near his home in Manchester, New York, and in 1829 he translated them into the Book of Mormon. Over the course of the next fifteen years, two things happened: Smith attracted followers at an amazing pace, locally and from around the world. And Smith and his growing flock were driven out of town after town as they made their way west.

The religious start-up boom that was the Second Great Awakening didn’t just spawn new Protestant denominations: entirely new religions were born. At first, Smith, who had attended revival meetings in upstate New York, described his new belief system as a sort of turbocharged Methodism. Smith believed that Jesus was the Messiah, that he died for our sins, and that he was resurrected in body and spirit. But Smith’s vision went much further, amounting, most religious scholars agree, to the first major new religion that the world had seen in hundreds of years.

Smith made his followers feel that they were part of an ongoing biblical drama that was every bit as real as the one the ancients had experienced. God still offered revelations (through Smith); the Holy Spirit still touched people directly (as evidenced by spiritual “gifts” such as talking in tongues); and the return of Christ was imminent. But the United States, not the Middle East, was the locus of the drama that was about to unfold. God would soon establish the New Jerusalem in America. For those struggling to make their way on the dangerous and uncertain frontier, Mormonism seemed spiritually rich, relevant, and thrilling.

The Book of Mormon told the story of Jesus’s activities in America. A lost tribe of Israel had traveled to the Americas around 600 BC. Soon after Jesus was crucified (so soon that the wound in his side was still open and the holes the nails had left could be seen in his hands), he appeared in America, where he spent several days visiting, praying, healing, and teaching. Before he left, he made three apostles impervious to attack. When evil men pushed them into furnaces or dens with wild animals, they survived—and continued to preach the gospel. One of those righteous leaders, Mormon, created and buried the golden plates so someone could later revive the teachings that Christ had brought to America.

Mormonism’s appeal went beyond its theology. Smith established communities where economic activity was strongly coordinated, which was appealing given the fragile nature of life on the frontier. Eventually, he required Mormons to donate their goods to a common pool, with the church using the funds to build temples and subsidize the poor. Mormons felt spiritually and economically nourished, part of a growing, protective family. By 1840, Smith had thirty thousand followers.

Residents of Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri found the Mormons to be terrifying. In 1842, Jonathan B. Turner, a professor at Illinois College, wrote that the Mormons were the “most dangerous and virulent enemies to our political and religious purity, and our social and civil peace, that now exist in the Union.” The threat, he wrote, was not so much that people would believe the Book of Mormon but that, presented with two books of miracles, they would decide neither was true and thus become atheists. Some believed the Mormons bastardized Christianity. In his 1842 pamphlet Mormonism Exposed and Refuted, the abolitionist minister La Roy Sunderland argued that the Mormons were ignorant of scripture and could not “perceive the vast, the momentous difference between the miracles recorded in the Bible, and the juggling tricks of Smith.” 

Others feared Mormon economic and political power. By 1833, Mormons already made up one-third of Jackson County, Missouri. A year later, Smith survived being tarred and feathered. A Protestant minister who participated in the attack said that he wanted to “get rid of” the Mormons because he feared they would take his property. This fear was stoked by Smith’s revelation that Independence, Missouri, would be the site of the New Kingdom of God when Christ returned. The Gentiles, as Mormons called nonbelievers, figured they could lose their land in the new millennium.

Smith merged church, state, and commerce. When the Mormons bought the town of Commerce, Illinois, and changed its name to Nauvoo, he named himself mayor, lieutenant general of the Nauvoo Legion, and treasurer of the church. Later, he would be appointed by church elders as “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth.” He controlled all land sales to Mormon members and orchestrated the creation of mills and factories. He even claimed that God had ordered the Mormons to build a hotel. (“And let it be a delightful habitation for man, and a resting-place for the weary traveler.… And they shall not receive less than fifty dollars for a share of stock in that house.”)

Many towns had their own militias, but in Nauvoo the Mormons went all out. Smith wore a uniform with gold braid and a hat topped with ostrich feathers. A US artillery officer who witnessed a parade of the Nauvoo Legion shared his misgivings in the New York Herald: “Why this exact discipline of the Mormon corps? Do they intend to conquer Missouri, Illinois, Mexico?” Smith thought that the Kingdom of God could be best approximated when righteous religious leaders also held the levers of government power. His need for control was no doubt reinforced by government officials’ refusal to defend the Mormons against attack. Convinced that the presidential candidates in 1844 were not taking the plight of Mormons seriously, he ran for the presidency himself, urging religious freedom for all Americans. He certainly did not believe that religious liberty required a separation of church and state. He stated that he sought to establish a “theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.” Yet, according to recently released minutes of early LDS deliberations, he adamantly urged tolerance of other religions. He lectured the LDS leaders that every person must have the right “of choosing for himself voluntarily his God, and what he pleases for his religion.” One eyewitness recorded Smith as saying to a gathering in Nauvoo “that if he were the emperor of the world and had control over the whole human family he would sustain every man, woman and child in the enjoyment of their religion.”

 

Extermination

When the citizens of Jackson County, Missouri, demanded that the Mormons leave, they offered this as the reason:

They were of the very dregs of that society from which they came, lazy, idle, and vicious.… They brought into our country little or no property with them and left less behind them, and we infer that those only yoke themselves to the “Mormon” car who had nothing earthly or heavenly to lose by change.

An editorial in the Missouri Commercial Appeal declared, “Their manners, customs, religion and all, are more obnoxious to our citizens than those of the Indians, and they can never live among us in peace. The rifle will settle the quarrel.”

The Mormons actively encouraged immigration, luring thousands of low-income, uneducated foreigners from right across the porous border. Missourians feared crime would rise and jobs would be lost because of these undocumented … Canadians. On September 12, 1838, the non-Mormons of Daviess County, Missouri, pleaded with the governor to help them “get rid of those Cannadian Refugees and Emmissaries of the prince of Darkness.” An anti-Mormon group in Carroll County complained that too many Mormons came from other parts of the world. “It is impossible that the two communities can long live together,” wrote the Signal. “They can never assimilate.”

Locals feared that Mormons would act as a unified voting bloc and then subjugate their political rivals. On Election Day, August 6, 1838, Mormons and non-Mormons scuffled in a town square. When one Mormon attempted to vote, a settler blocked him and declared, “Daviess County don’t allow Mormons to vote no more than niggers.” A riot ensued.

The Mormons were suspected of being anti-slavery themselves. Smith was no abolitionist and believed slaveholders had every right to keep their slaves. But most Mormon converts were from Northern states and therefore mistrusted. In July 1833, W. W. Phelps, a New Yorker who had become the editor of the pro-Mormon newspaper in Missouri, went rogue and advocated that slaves convert to Mormonism. Furious local civic leaders called for the expulsion of Mormons from the county. Phelps quickly retracted the article, but five hundred settlers met, broke into the office of the newspaper, destroyed the printing press, and tarred and feathered two Mormon leaders. The Gentiles also feared that Mormons had overly cozy relations with the Indians.

After residents of Clay County, Missouri, asked the Mormons to leave, the governor decided not to defend them. With stunning cowardice, he summarized the problem: “Your neighbors accuse your people of holding illicit communication with the Indians, and of being opposed to slavery. You deny. Whether the charge or the denial is true I cannot tell. The fact exists and your neighbors seem to believe it is true; and whether true or false, the consequences will be the same.” He urged them to convince neighbors of their innocence: “If you cannot do this, all I can say to you is that in this Republic the vox populi is the vox Dei.” 

Historian Juanita Brooks describes how mobs of Missourians terrorized Mormons:

Bands of armed bandits scoured the country, driving off stock, breaking windows and furniture, driving out women and children then shooting to frighten them further as they ran for shelter into the fields.

Then began the burnings. A mob would ride up to a farmhouse, order the family out, give them a generous few minutes in which to salvage such necessities as they could and allow them to watch the glow of their burning home against the sky, or to compare its blaze with that of the granary and haystack. If the owners resented it or had too much to say, it was sometimes fun to enliven the party by giving the father a taste of blacksnake [whip] in full view of his terrified children or by stripping him and smearing his body with tar.

Mormons began to arm themselves, but the lieutenant governor, Lilburn Boggs, promised that if they disarmed he would protect them. After word spread that the Mormons had given up their guns, a mob sacked Mormon homes and drove them from Jackson County. Smith tried to negotiate a settlement that would recapture some of their lands, but his offer was rejected, prompting the editor of the Liberty Enquirer to write, “The citizens of Jackson are determined to dispute every inch of ground, burn every blade of grass, and suffer their bones to bleach on the hills, rather than the Mormons should return to Jackson County.”

With his people under attack, Smith militarized the Mormons. They created a secret society known as the Danites, and some Mormon leaders became infected with martial fervor. Sampson Avard instructed his men to go to non-Mormon settlements and take what they needed: “For it is written, the riches of the Gentiles shall be consecrated to my people, the house of Israel; and thus you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property; and in this way we will build up the kingdom of God.” On July 4, 1838, Sidney Rigdon went even further, declaring, fatefully, “From this day and hour we will suffer it no more.… And that mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination; for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us.”

Smith himself used an analogy with modern resonances. According to the testimony of one apostate Mormon leader, Smith reacted to a spate of incidents in which Mormons were beaten unconscious by comparing himself to Muḥammad. “Like Mohammed, whose motto in treating for peace was ‘the Alcoran [the Quran] or the Sword.’ So shall it eventually be with us—‘Joseph Smith or the Sword!’” 

The similarities between Smith and Muḥammad were noticed by others. In a glowing dispatch from the New York Herald—“Wonderful progress of Joe Smith, the modern Mahomet”—the correspondent recounted the arrival of new religions throughout world history. “But a new age has come—a fresh infusion of faith is required.… May not this wonderful Mormon movement be the signal for a new religious movement? Is not Joe Smith its master spirit?”

Mormon soldiers clashed on a few occasions with non-Mormon settlers in what came to be known as the Mormon War. Most encounters were minor, but rumors and fabrications proliferated. In the fall of 1838, Lilburn Boggs, now governor, was told—falsely—that Mormons had massacred a group of Missouri militia members. He soon issued one of the most infamous documents in the history of religious liberty: Missouri Executive Order 44. Writing to his military commander, General John B. Clark, on October 27, Boggs declared that Mormons had adopted “the attitude of an open and avowed defiance of the laws, and of having made war upon the people of this State.” Therefore, he wrote,

the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace.

To implement what came to be known as the “extermination order,” the general was instructed to increase his forces “to any extent you may consider necessary.”

Three days after the order was issued, on October 30, 1838, the biggest religiously motivated massacre in American history occurred. About two hundred fifty Missourians, including a state senator, arrived at Haun’s Mill, a small Mormon community. They rode their horses forward, assembled in a line, and, when they were about seventy-five yards away, opened fire. Children and women screamed and ran for cover. Some retreated to the blacksmith shop, built of loose-fitting logs. After raining bullets on it for a while, the militia members entered the building. A nine-year-old boy, Sardius Smith, was still alive, having crawled under the bellows for protection. He pleaded for his life. One soldier put his gun to the boy’s head and, according to an eyewitness, “literally blew off the upper part of it, leaving the skull empty and dry while the brains and hair of the murdered boy were scattered around and on the walls.” When one of the other militia men suggested that his actions were excessive, the gunman replied, “Nits make lice.”

The attackers chased down a white-haired seventy-eight-year-old Mormon, Thomas McBride, who had fought under Horatio Gates and George Washington in the Revolutionary War. They demanded his gun, which he gave them. They then took a corn knife, a scythe used for cutting stalks, and chopped up McBride’s face. The soldiers stripped the dead of their boots and clothing and told the survivors that if they didn’t leave by the next day, they too would die.

In all, seventeen Mormons were killed and fifteen wounded. Fearful that the soldiers would desecrate the bodies, the survivors quickly dumped them in an unfinished well. “All through the night we heard the groans of the dying,” one recalled. Soon after, the Mormons left Missouri for Illinois, where they built the town of Nauvoo. A year later, a mob murdered Joseph Smith.

 

Exodus

After the persecutions, the massacres, and the assassination of their founder, the Mormons decided to leave America. The LDS Church’s new leader, Brigham Young, explained: “The exodus of the nation of the only true Israel from these United States to a far distant region of the West, where bigotry, intolerance and insatiable oppression lose their power over them—forms a new epoch.”

On February 10, 1848, the Mormons left the United States for the territory of Utah. Alas, though Utah was a part of Mexico when they started their journey, within a year it had been transferred to the United States. Still, the Saints lived in peace there for almost a decade. Undeterred by the attacks on Mormonism, new adherents poured in from around the world in response to recruitment missions. Soon, some forty thousand Mormons had settled in the new homeland.

But the Mormons came under attack again—this time by the US Army. On July 18, 1857, President James Buchanan dispatched the Tenth Infantry Regiment from Fort Leavenworth, soon to be joined by the Fifth Infantry, 1,200 American soldiers. “This is the first rebellion which has existed in our Territories; and humanity itself requires that we should put it down in such a manner that it shall be the last,” Buchanan declared. “We ought to go there with such an imposing force as to convince these deluded people that resistance would be vain, and thus spare the effusion of blood.” He exaggerated in calling the circumstance a “rebellion,” but it is true that Brigham Young was both the head of the church and the governor of the territory, and the church had been routinely undercutting the authority of the territorial courts and administrators.

Buchanan had decided to install a new governor. Since he assumed that Young wouldn’t step down voluntarily, he’d sent the new governor in with the massive military escort to deal with the “frenzied fanaticism as exists among the Mormons.” 

When Mormon leaders got wind of what was happening, they were, not surprisingly, alarmed, especially given their past experiences with government militias. “An army has been sent by the United States to make war upon us for the sole purpose of destroying The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” declared future church president Wilford Woodruff. Fortunately, a full military confrontation was forestalled. The army paused on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, and the Mormon leadership sent thousands of residents on an “exodus” to Provo, Utah, and safety.

But the episode illustrated that the United States had little idea how to deal with the rapidly growing non-Protestant religion. For the next fifty years, the LDS Church and the Gentiles would fight, both citing the Constitution as their guidepost. Some of the flash points from the first half of the nineteenth century were revisited: the concern that the Mormons fused church and state; their passion for drawing in new immigrants; their militarism; their heavy-handed treatment of Gentiles. But the explosive new element that enraged the rest of the nation was the Mormon practice of polygamy.

The doctrine of “plural marriage” or “celestial marriage” came directly from Joseph Smith. Rumors had swirled for years that Smith had married multiple women, but he denied them and attacked his accusers. But by the mid-1840s, the truth could no longer be suppressed. On August 12, 1843, the Prophet told church leaders that he’d received a revelation from God that having multiple wives not only was allowed but was a requirement for priesthood. He cited the polygamous marriages in the Old Testament, including those of Abraham, David, Jacob, and Solomon (who had at least seven hundred wives) and the system’s effectiveness at fulfilling God’s injunction to be fruitful and multiply. Smith was particularly taken by Jacob’s belief that if a man slept with a woman, he had an obligation to make her one of his wives (“And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife”).

Polygamy was consistent with the Mormon desire to embrace a literally biblical way of life, a “restitution of all things.” In the Mormons’ larger cosmology, spirits live on after death. Only those in families could be “sealed” and achieve full “exaltation” in the afterlife. By marrying a woman, a Mormon man was ensuring the afterlife of his wife. And only those men who practiced plural marriage could achieve the highest level of priesthood during the forthcoming reign of Christ. In addition, polygamy encouraged the birth of many children, crucial because there was a surplus of pre-mortal spirits awaiting bodily vessels. Eventually, Smith had approximately twenty-seven wives, scholars believe. At least twelve were women who were already married. One wife was fifteen years old, another sixteen. There were two mother-daughter pairs.

Smith’s revelation did not go over well with many Mormon leaders, not to mention his first wife, Emma. One Mormon leader, William Law, was disgusted by the doctrine, even more so after Smith hit on his wife. Law bolted from the church and set up a dissident newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, in which he described Smith’s polygamy to the rest of the world. Smith, then the mayor of Nauvoo, instructed the city council to destroy the Expositor’s printing press.

Over time, almost all of the Mormon leaders took multiple wives. Brigham Young had fifty-five. As the years went on, they continued to explain polygamy as a significant religious doctrine. They also strongly believed it solved a variety of social problems. Orson Pratt, a leader of the church and Mitt Romney’s great-great grandfather, suggested it was a time-tested way to wipe out prostitution—“in the way the Lord devised in ancient times; that is, by giving to his faithful servants a plurality of wives.” They mocked monogamists who hailed the sanctity of marriage while having mistresses on the side. “Our crime has been: we married women instead of seducing them,” said apostle George Q. Cannon. “We reared children instead of destroying them; we desire to exclude from the land prostitution, bastardy and infanticide.”

To counter the argument that polygamy enslaved women, Mormon wives testified by the hundreds in support of the tradition. “Our enemies pretend that in Utah, woman is held in a state of vassalage—that she does not act from choice, but by coercion—that we would even prefer life elsewhere, were it possible for us to make our escape,” Eliza Snow declared. “What nonsense!” Martha Hughes Cannon advanced a decidedly feminist argument. Sharing the burden of matrimony with other women, she said, freed up time so she could become both a physician and a state senator. “A plural wife is not half as much a slave as a single wife,” she said.

To strengthen their feminist credibility (and increase the size of their voting population), in 1870 the Mormons took the bold step of allowing women to vote, more than four decades before the Nineteenth Amendment granted women suffrage nationally. But the rest of the nation remained disgusted, and maybe a bit titillated, by polygamy, which was linked to a more general sense that Mormon culture was depraved. The book that introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world in 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study in Scarlet, depicted Mormons as murderous kidnappers. Hundreds of popular novels and magazine articles offered tales of Mormon depravity. Alfreda Eva Bell, author of a popular anti-Mormon novel of the era, wrote that women in Utah “are in fact white slaves; are required to do the most servile drudgery; are painfully impressed with their utter inferiority.”

In 1856, the brand-new Republican Party explicitly linked polygamy and slavery as “twin relics of barbarism.” Harriett Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, suggested that action against slavery could create a precedent for the abolition of polygamy. Indeed, polygamy was less popular than slavery, which at least had the support of the Southern aristocracy. Polygamy would, its critics declared, lead to the decline of civilization. “Point me to a nation where polygamy is practiced, and I will point you to heathens and barbarians,” said Caleb Lyon, the governor of Idaho.

Mormons were creating an “Asiatic” race, according to some opponents. In a presentation at the New Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1861, military doctor Robert Bartholow described a typical polygamist: “yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eye; the thick, protuberant lips, the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair, and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.” This context explains the otherwise perplexing comment from Mormon leader Heber Kimball that “we are not accounted as white people.”

Polygamy was just a gross secular practice being given a religious justification, other critics argued, doubting that it was even a sincerely espoused component of the Mormons’ theology. “We are told,” Vermont representative Justin Morrill declared, “that we must tamely submit to any burlesque, outrage, or indecency which artful men may seek to hide under the name of religion!” Schuyler Colfax, vice president under Ulysses S. Grant, challenged the third president of the church, John Taylor: “I do not concede that the institution you have established here, and which is condemned by the law, is a question of religion.”

“With us it is ‘Celestial Marriage,’” Taylor responded. “Take this from us and you rob us of our hopes and associations in the resurrection of the just.”

Polygamy was not the only issue in the battle for public opinion. The Mormons were in some ways premillennialists. They believed that Christ would soon return to rule Earth but that they needed to start the creation of that kingdom right away, not merely wait for Jesus to do all the work. The LDS Church needed to run society. The Mormons’ electoral system thus relied on a non-secret ballot, which allowed the church leadership greater control. The legislature gave the local probate courts—controlled by the church—broad authority, reducing the influence of the federal courts. Creating a godly kingdom also meant an economic organization that (and this is no exaggeration) approximated communism. The goal, never fully achieved, was to have land be communally owned and then lent back out to individuals. The church in Utah limited the ability of non-Mormons to own property, resisted federal surveyors’ attempts to inspect their land, and discouraged Mormons from trading with non-Mormons. 

Perhaps most problematic, the Mormon leadership became increasingly militarized and separationist. “In regard to those who have persecuted this people and driven them to the mountains, I intend to meet them on their own grounds,” Brigham Young thundered. “We could take the same law they have taken, viz., mobocracy, and if any miserable scoundrels come here, cut their throats.” Not without some justification, they feared future massacres and annihilation. The Missouri “extermination order” was recent history; they viewed “American” hostility as potentially lethal. On the eve of the 1856 conflict with the US Army, one Mormon leader, Isaac C. Haight, stated:

The [Missourians] drove us out to starve. When we pled for mercy, Haun’s Mill was our answer, and when we asked for bread they gave us a stone. We left the confines of civilization and came far into the wilderness where we could worship God according to the dictates of our own conscience without annoyance to our neighbors. We resolved that if they would leave us alone we would never trouble them.

But the Gentiles will not leave us alone. They have followed us and hounded us. They come among us asking us to trade with them, and in the name of humanity to feed them. All of these we have done and now they are sending an army to exterminate us.

So far as I am concerned I have been driven from my home for the last time. I am prepared to feed to the Gentiles the same bread they fed to us. God being my helper I will give the last ounce of strength and if need be my last drop of blood in defense of Zion.

That truculent spirit may have contributed to one of the most tragic episodes in Mormon history—a moment that helped cement the public perception of Mormons as violent and prone to terrorism. In 1857, a wagon train of western settlers from Arkansas, the Baker-Fancher party, was passing through an area called Mountain Meadows in the Salt Lake region. A group of more than fifty Mormons, under the leadership of the regional Mormon militia, attacked. After several days of fighting, the Mormons announced that they would let the emigrants go if they surrendered some of their cattle. After they did, each male settler was paired with an LDS Church member and told to walk in a single file. As they did, there came a cry: “Halt!” That was the signal for the Mormons to kill the men. Members of a local Indian tribe who were coconspirators emerged from the bushes to kill the women and children. In all, 120 were murdered, including 50 children. The dead were thrown into a ravine and covered with dirt. Seventeen children who were deemed too young to describe what had happened were spared and taken to live in Mormon households. A grotesque cover-up ensued, with the church initially blaming the local Indians who had participated. But an army investigation concluded that Mormons were involved.

In the eyes of their critics, all of these factors—the theocratic nature of Mormon governance, the violent incidents, the secrecy—meant that Mormonism was not so much a religion as a political system, or, as the Kalamazoo Telegraph put it, an “immoral and quasi criminal conspiracy.” It would not be enough to eliminate polygamy; they would have to destroy the entire machine.

For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, the US government waged an unprecedented war against both plural marriage and Mormonism more broadly. In 1862, the Republican Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, which outlawed polygamy, annulled the incorporation of the Mormon Church, and forbade the church from owning real estate valued at more than $50,000. The law was designed to break the religion. Hostile to Republican government, Mormonism sought to “maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism,” claimed Representative Morrill. In 1871, Brigham Young himself was indicted for practicing polygamy.

Wasn’t the law a blatant violation of the First Amendment? After all, it attempted to destroy the church itself. That was certainly the view of the Mormons, and in 1879 they challenged the law before the US Supreme Court. The test case, one of the first on religious freedom, involved George Reynolds, a secretary to a number of Mormon leaders. He was young (thereby countering the images of skeevy old Mormon men with their harems of young wives) and he had just two wives, making it easier to imagine their loving relationships. The Mormons argued that since polygamy was not only a belief but also a religious duty, it was protected by the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause.

On January 6, 1879, the Court ruled, unanimously, against the Mormon Church. Reynolds v. United States upheld all of the anti-Mormon legislation. Chief Justice Morrison Waite acknowledged that the First Amendment protected religious beliefs, even making reference to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists and the separation of church and state. But the First Amendment protects only religious beliefs, he stipulated, not religious behavior. “Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices,” Waite wrote. To rule otherwise, he said, would enable groups to justify all manner of abominable behavior on religious grounds. “Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship; would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pyre of her dead husband; would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice?” He offered a narrow but clear-cut rationale for why religious freedom should not protect religiously motivated behavior. “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land,” he wrote. That would “permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”

While championing the freedom to believe, the Court cast religious freedom narrowly—leaving citizens and future generations of judges to grapple with the deeper question: Is it really religious freedom if we can’t live our lives according to our faith?

The Court also seemed to accept the assumption of the law’s sponsor, Justin Morrill, that polygamy wasn’t really a spiritually justified practice. The government could not accept “the pretense that, as religious beliefs, their supporters could be protected” by the Constitution. The ruling echoed the idea that polygamy was the emblem of primitive nonwhite peoples. “Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.”

Mormon leaders were surprised and devastated. “Now Latter-day Saints, what are we going to do under the circumstances?” asked Wilford Woodruff. “God says ‘we shall be damned if we do not obey the law.’ Congress says ‘we shall be damned if we do’.… Now who shall we obey? God or man? My voice is that we will obey God.”

They were on legal thin ice. They had managed to avoid local enforcement of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in Utah, but after the Reynolds decision, Congress followed up with legislation designed to obliterate polygamy and the church. In 1882, it passed the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act, which banned “unlawful cohabitation,” since it was easier to prove than marriage. Those guilty of cohabitation or polygamy could not vote, hold public office, or serve on juries.

In 1887, Congress approved the Edmunds-Tucker Act, which launched a multifront attack on the church itself. It disincorporated the LDS Church and suggested that confiscated church property be sold off, with the proceeds used to fund public education. The law nullified the Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company, which had financed Mormon immigration. It required jurors and voters to take an anti-polygamy oath. It required Mormon wives to testify against their husbands in polygamy cases. It replaced local judges—who tended to avoid ruling against Mormons—with federal judges in polygamy cases. And, after years of claiming that Mormonism abused women, Congress revoked Utah women’s voting rights.

The neighboring state of Idaho went the furthest of all, denying the right to vote not just to polygamists but to anyone who is part of an “organization” that allows such a practice. In other words, it stripped the right to vote from Mormons. Amazingly, the Supreme Court affirmed these laws too. In Davis v. Beason, the Court unanimously upheld the Idaho law, with Justice Stephen Johnson Field echoing the distinction between the protections of beliefs and actions. The Bill of Rights really meant only to allow an American to have his own “relations to his Creator” and to protect his “modes of worship.” Polygamy was not a mode of worship or, for that matter, a real religious doctrine: “A crime is nonetheless so, nor less odious, because sanctioned by what any particular sect may designate as religion.”

 

The Raid

From 1882 to 1896, in a period that came to be known as “The Raid,” scores of federal officials scoured the territory for polygamous marriages. Bounties were offered for information leading to the capture of a suspect. Mormon men had to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. One mother told her children to respond to questions by saying they didn’t know the names of their parents or where they lived. A polygamist wife described the feeling of desperation:

It is difficult to picture the unsettled conditions in Utah and Idaho during the raid against polygamists. Homes were broken up and families scattered among relatives or friends.… Some had secret hiding places in their own homes; others trained the children to watch for the Deputy Marshall, and to evade or deceive when asked questions by strangers or deputies about family relations. If people were at any public gatherings and the federal marshal entered the town, there was a scattering of local Church authorities.… Mothers ran with their babies to the neighbors; old men took to the fields.

From 1882 to 1896, there were fourteen hundred indictments under the anti-polygamy acts. Nearly one thousand Mormons were jailed, most in the Utah Territorial Penitentiary. George Q. Cannon, the representative of Utah to Congress, was imprisoned—and defiantly posed in a stunning photo of a few dozen Mormons in striped prison uniforms. By sticking to their principles and refusing to denounce their own family structures, Mormons had engaged in a massive act of civil disobedience.

The situation pained Mormon leaders. They declared their intent to fight for God’s word, but they knew that the members of the church could not live on the run forever. They had some difficult decisions to make. Should they keep defending polygamy? Should they keep believing that polygamy is a central religious obligation? The Mormon leaders knew they had lost—in Congress, in the Supreme Court, and in the media. They had thought they had the protection of the Bill of Rights, but they were wrong. Now, many in Congress wanted to go further and destroy the religion itself.

The Mormon leaders bitterly resented being put in the position of having to choose between their survival and their beliefs, but they were forced to ask: Was it worth it? In answering that question, they balanced the defense of their religious doctrine with something more temporal: their yearning for statehood. Utah leaders since 1849 had petitioned to have the territory become a state. They knew that they would actually have more freedom and autonomy as a state, which had stipulated rights under the Constitution, than as a territory. “We are now, politically speaking, a dependency or ward of the United States,” Wilford Woodruff, now the LDS Church president, cannily explained. “But in a State capacity we would be freed from such dependency, and would possess the power and independence of a sovereign State, with authority to make and execute our own laws.”

And Woodruff knew something else. While Congress had repeatedly rejected Utah’s statehood applications, circumstances had changed. More and more politicians were warming to the idea of Utah becoming a state, if Mormons would only eliminate polygamy. What was different? Politics and demographics—the balance of power was shifting from east to west. In just the previous decade, the US Senate and the electoral college had added the states of Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota to their membership. Mormons now represented a sizable number of votes beyond Utah. From 1876 to 1879, more than one hundred Mormon settlements had been established in Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, and other states. Membership in the church had reached around two hundred thousand, more than the combined populations of Nevada, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Both political parties now curried favor with Mormons. Money played a role as well. The railroad corporations wanted to build through Utah and made a secret deal with Mormon leaders to aid their statehood claims in exchange for help with the construction plans. Railroad interests had blocked earlier anti-polygamy legislation “to preserve anticipated profits in Mormon country,” wrote historian J. Spencer Fluhman. Now they were helping to normalize the Mormons.

But for Mormons, eliminating polygamy wasn’t just a matter of deleting a clause from a contract. For sixty years they had insisted that the practice was mandated by God. How could they change this policy without making rank-and-file Mormons think the leadership had been disingenuous all along? The church leaders could not simply shift their position.

But God could. On September 18, 1890, Woodruff met with a group of top church leaders. He revealed that he had been “struggling all night with the Lord” and had news: the church should no longer countenance polygamy. He didn’t so much denounce the practice as diminish its importance relative to the commitment to obey the laws of the land.

Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of 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.

At first, the apostles were furious. Several rose from their seats and, holding back tears, declared that they were willing to suffer persecution or death rather than violate their covenants with their wives. But Woodruff had the ultimate rebuttal: “the Holy Spirit had revealed that it was necessary.” The new doctrine became known as “the Manifesto.” That was all Congress needed. In January 1896, Utah became a state.

There is one final chapter to this story. Many in Congress suspected that the Mormons had only said they opposed polygamy in order to get statehood and that once they had the grand prize, they would resume the practice. Sure enough, it came to be known that some Mormon leaders continued to practice polygamy. This so enraged members of Congress that, from 1903 to 1907, some tried to expel Utah’s new Mormon senator, Reed Smoot. In hearings stretching over four years, one hundred witnesses testified. The Reverend Charles L. Thompson, leader of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, did not mince his words: “[Mormonism] is not to be educated, not to be civilized, not to be reformed—it must be crushed.… Beware the Octopus. There is one moment in which to seize it, says Victor Hugo. It is when it thrusts forth its head. It has done it. Its high priest claims a senator’s chair in Washington. Now is the time to strike.” One commentator predicted that “the Smoot case will abolish Mormonism without war … cleansing the country of one of the barbarous relics.” Previously compared to Muslims, the Mormons were now also compared to Catholics. A senator warned his colleagues to beware “the fine Italian hand of the Mormon apostles.”

But in this final battle, we begin to hear a motif that would recur in future debates over religious liberty. Some senators began to identify with the plight of the Mormons, recognizing that successful attacks on the LDS Church could make their own faiths vulnerable. Former Idaho senator William J. McConnell wrote, “If we close the doors of the Senate today against Smoot why not against the members of the Catholic Church next session?” Senator John Lourie Beveridge of Illinois noted that the attacks on Mormonism sounded similar to earlier attacks on Methodism. Ultimately, the senators began to believe they were throwing stones from a glass house. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania reportedly said, “I think the Senate should prefer a polygamist who doesn’t ‘polyg’ to a monogamist who doesn’t ‘monog.’”

The Senate voted to allow Smoot to stay. In the words of historian Kathleen Flake, the vote “marked the beginning of the nation’s acceptance of the Latter-day Saints on the same denominational terms as other American religions: obedience, loyalty, and tolerance defined in political, not religious terms.” She also suggests that the growing acceptance of Mormons reflected another change in American politics, one that would be brought to the fore as the Progressive Era continued. In the economic sphere, progressives sought to create a set of rules that would ensure fair competition. They applied the same principles to religion. Mormonism could be tolerated as long as the LDS Church was willing to play by the same rules as other faiths did. This echoed the founders’ free market of faith. It worked well, as long as pro-competition policies kept one denomination from disadvantaging another.

In several ways, the clash with Mormons resembled the Protestant-Catholic conflict. Like Catholics, Mormons were described as hostile to American values of democracy. They were cast as alien, Asiatic, nonwhite, and perverse. Immigration fueled both the sect’s rapid growth and the backlash against it. The churches’ growth stirred a sometimes justifiable fear that their members would exert political power.

Whatever incipient notions of universal religious liberty existed in this period could not accommodate a faith that was this far outside the mainstream. Americans had not sufficiently imbibed the all-for-one, one-for-all notion that destroying one faith’s liberty would ultimately harm everyone’s. Leaders of other religions rarely defended Mormons and often led the attacks against them. Some of them would pay dearly for their myopia. The Reynolds v. United States and Davis v. Beason decisions stood for more than eighty-five years. While the US Supreme Court allowed Americans to believe whatever they wished, it didn’t protect their right to practice their faiths or to live their lives in accordance with their religious scruples.

But the Mormon episode also showed how the religious freedom model could grow slowly stronger. After years of attacking the LDS Church, Congress ultimately welcomed Utah as a state and, with it, its dominant religion. In this case, it was the political system more than the legal system that worked. The Mormons’ presence in key states gave them added clout. But they could use it only if they made a massive theological compromise. The Mormons made that choice, and it allowed them to enter the mainstream. Not all groups were offered such a choice.