twin relics of barbarism

The expression twin relics of barbarism became a compact political indictment of polygamy and slavery, placing both practices under one promise of federal prohibition. In the book’s account, the phrase marks more than anti-polygamy sentiment: it introduces a long conflict over who could make and enforce the law when religious commitments collided with government authority.

Political Meaning and Context

In 1856, Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont pledged to “prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.” The formulation paired two practices that many Victorian-era Americans regarded as brutish, turning plural marriage from a religious doctrine into a defining national political controversy. Frémont lost, but the phrase anticipated a sustained federal campaign against the Mormon practice.

The pledge acquired immediate force when, a year later, President James Buchanan sent the U.S. Army to Utah to dismantle Brigham Young’s theocracy and eradicate polygamy. That intervention became the 1857–1858 Utah War, but it neither removed Brigham Young from power nor ended plural marriage. The contrast between the campaign’s sweeping language and its limited immediate result frames the expression’s central political tension: condemnation did not by itself settle who held governing authority in the territories.

Religious Authority and Competing Laws

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints treated plural marriage not as a marginal custom but as a sacred doctrine. Joseph Smith had made it central to the church’s teachings, and Brigham Young defended it as a religious liberty protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. His position rested on a sharper claim of jurisdiction: God’s law, he held, took precedence over the laws of men, especially laws made by non-Mormons.

That claim was reinforced by institutions. Nauvoo had already given Joseph Smith unusual sovereign powers under a municipal charter, making the city a theocratic principality with its own disciplined militia. Later, in Utah Territory, the Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Brigham Young controlled. Mormon bishops often served as judges, and predominantly Mormon juries were instructed according to church leaders’ directions. In practice, this arrangement sought to ensure that when federal and religious law conflicted, the church’s interpretation prevailed. Federal officials described the resulting order as a theocratic dictatorship; the expression’s denunciation of polygamy thus sat within a wider struggle over courts, political power, and the reach of federal government.

Federal Pressure and Public Renunciation

The 1857 intervention did not end the dispute. Judicial and legislative challenges accumulated, culminating in the Edmunds–Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the church and transferred to the federal government church property valued above $50,000. Under that pressure, church leaders publicly renounced polygamy in 1890.

The renunciation did not immediately end the practice. Leaders quietly sent groups of Mormons to establish plural-marriage colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some senior church authorities continued to take plural wives and perform plural marriages into the twentieth century. The distinction between public policy and private continuation complicates the clean resolution implied by a prohibition campaign. The book argues that the later Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became a more conventional and politically successful institution through its eventual rejection of polygamy and cooperation with government prosecutions of polygamists.

Later Echoes of the Conflict

The underlying argument persisted among Mormon Fundamentalists, though the original phrase concerned the political pairing of polygamy and slavery. Fundamentalists continued to assert that religious practice should be beyond government interference. In Colorado City, Sam Roundy, the polygamous police chief, defended the privacy of households and asked whether residents had a right to practice their religion; the book sets this claim against the fact that polygamy was a crime in every U.S. state and in Canada.

Other examples show how religious authority could extend beyond marriage into daily conduct and family life. Under Rulon Jeffs, residents were forbidden to watch television or read newspapers, and members who left the United Effort Plan could be cut off from contact with those who remained. When DeLoy Bateman left the faith, Rulon Jeffs ordered that his wives and children be taken and assigned to another man; both wives refused, and most of the children left the religion with them. The episode presents the cost of competing claims to authority not as an abstract constitutional question but as a struggle over relationships and belonging.

A related argument appears in Dan Lafferty’s self-directed study of Mormon scripture: he concluded that government had no right to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers, treating such demands as illegitimate control over individual life. Together, these later cases show why the political legacy of the expression outlasted the 1856 campaign. The dispute was repeatedly renewed wherever religious leaders or believers claimed a jurisdiction that civil law sought to limit.