Underground Plural Marriage after the 1890 Manifesto

Underground Plural Marriage after the 1890 Manifesto was the persistence of plural marriage after the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly pledged to comply with laws against it. The Manifesto announced a change in the church’s official position, but did not immediately end the practice: senior leaders continued to counsel and solemnize plural marriages in private, while dissenters argued that no human authority could cancel a divine commandment. The result was not a clean break but a prolonged struggle over revelation, institutional authority, and the limits of obedience to civil law.

The Manifesto and the pressure to retreat

By 1890 the church faced a crisis of political and legal power. After John Taylor died in 1887, Wilford Woodruff became the fourth Mormon prophet. Federal legal actions against the church had culminated that May in a United States Supreme Court ruling that allowed the government to seize church property. The church’s ability to preserve its institutions, as well as its religious practices, was in jeopardy.

Woodruff later reported that on the night of September 23 he struggled over the church’s predicament and the question of what should be done. The following morning he summoned five trusted leaders and told them that he had received a revelation requiring the church to give up the practice for which its members had been willing to die. The reversal stunned the men present. In Woodruff’s account, compliance with the law was not simply a political calculation: it was what the Lord now required under the circumstances.

On October 6, 1890, Woodruff made the decision public in a short document known as the Woodruff Manifesto. It declared his intention to submit to congressional laws against plural marriage and to use his influence to encourage church members to do likewise. He advised Latter-day Saints to refrain from entering marriages prohibited by law. The declaration therefore set a clear public rule for the institution, even as it left open the difficult question of what the revelation meant for believers who regarded plural marriage as permanently sacred.

A public end, a private continuation

The Manifesto shook the religious community but did not immediately end plural marriage. For roughly the next two decades, members of the church’s First Presidency privately advised believers that the practice should continue discreetly, and senior church leaders performed numerous plural marriages in secret. Public submission and private counsel thus pulled in opposite directions: the institution affirmed compliance, while some of its highest authorities helped sustain the practice they had ostensibly renounced.

That contradiction became public in October 1910, when the Salt Lake Tribune published the names of about two hundred Latter-day Saints who had married plural wives after the Manifesto. The list included six members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. The disclosure exposed the gap between the church’s public position and the private conduct of leaders, making the issue a crisis of credibility within as well as outside the faith.

The response was not limited to non-Mormon critics. Prominent Latter-day Saints also objected to leadership’s concealment, and a movement grew within the church to enforce the Manifesto and eliminate plural marriage. By the 1920s, most members, including church leaders, had turned against the practice and supported prosecuting those who continued it. What had once been defended as a sacred communal principle was increasingly treated by the mainstream church as an unlawful practice from which it needed to distance itself.

The fundamentalist refusal

Other believers reached the opposite conclusion. They held that Woodruff had been gravely mistaken and that obeying the Manifesto contradicted the faith’s most sacred commitments. Their central scriptural argument was that Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith’s 1843 revelation on plural marriage, remained part of accepted Mormon scripture. In their reading, the Manifesto had suspended the practice under temporary, exceptional pressure; it had not revoked the commandment itself.

These believers drew particular strength from John Taylor’s revelation of September 26, 1886. Taylor had asked whether the earlier divine commandment concerning plural marriage should be abandoned. The revelation, as preserved by fundamentalists, said that commandments remained binding unless God or his authority revoked them, and affirmed that this law had not been revoked. Its force rested on a claim about who could end a divine obligation: a change in public church policy, the fundamentalists argued, was not proof that God had withdrawn the commandment.

Taylor’s reported actions gave that claim an organizational as well as a scriptural legacy. He warned a group of Saints that some might be ostracized or expelled for remaining faithful to the principle, then authorized five men, including Samuel Bateman, John W. Woolley, and Lorin C. Woolley, to perform celestial marriages and ordain others to do so. The account of this meeting has been disputed by Church authorities. For fundamentalists, however, the claimed authorization offered a way to continue the practice outside the changing policy of the main institution and to pass religious authority onward.

A conflict over revelation and authority

The dispute grew from a tension that had marked Mormonism from its beginning: personal revelation could authorize religious conviction, but competing revelations could also challenge the church’s control over doctrine. Joseph Smith had encouraged Saints to seek impressions from the Lord, then restricted who could receive commandments for the church, asserting his own exclusive prophetic authority. The popularity of direct revelation made that restriction difficult to enforce. The book connects this conflict to the splintering of Mormon groups, as believers continued to follow revelations that diverged from institutional decisions.

The Manifesto became a decisive test of that tension. To the mainstream church, it marked a new course under legal pressure and an effort to bring church practice into compliance with national law. To fundamentalists, the lasting commandment and Taylor’s revelation carried greater authority than the institution’s retreat. That conviction helped seed a movement that remained committed to Joseph Smith’s teachings, especially plural marriage, even as the wider church moved toward the American mainstream. The book links this inheritance to later fundamentalist communities and to Dan Lafferty, whose own rejection of the modern church was shaped by the belief that it had abandoned plural marriage under government pressure.