Statehood, Polygamy, and the Long Negotiation with Washington

Utah petitioned for statehood six times between eighteen forty-nine and eighteen ninety-five. Each time, Congress refused. The reason, stated plainly, was polygamy, the practice of plural marriage that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had publicly announced in eighteen fifty-two and that a significant minority of Church members practiced. Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in eighteen sixty-two and the Edmunds Act in eighteen eighty-two, the latter disenfranchising any man who practiced or believed in polygamy and stripping Church corporations of property above fifty thousand dollars.

The Church tested the laws and lost. In eighteen seventy-nine the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v. United States that religious belief did not excuse criminal behavior, effectively deciding that polygamy could be prosecuted regardless of its religious character. Hundreds of men were imprisoned or driven underground. Brigham Young himself had died in eighteen seventy-seven with more than fifty wives and fifty-seven children, never prosecuted but never forgotten by opponents.

The break came in eighteen ninety, when Church President Wilford Woodruff issued a document called the Manifesto, advising Church members to refrain from plural marriages going forward. Woodruff said he had received a revelation. Critics then and since have argued that the revelation arrived conveniently as Congress was preparing legislation that would have dissolved the Church entirely.

Whatever its spiritual origins, the Manifesto was sufficient. Congress restored civil rights to Church members who complied, territorial officials began the long process of rapprochement, and on January fourth, eighteen ninety-six, President Grover Cleveland signed the proclamation admitting Utah as the forty-fifth state of the Union. The Star-Spangled Banner was raised over the territorial capitol in Salt Lake City. Utah's state constitution, drafted the year before, included a clause permanently banning polygamy, and granted women the right to vote, which they had first won in territorial Utah in eighteen seventy, lost in eighteen eighty-seven, and now recovered at last.