Edmunds Act

The Edmunds Act was an 1882 federal measure that made it possible to prosecute Mormons not only for plural marriage itself, which authorities found difficult to prove, but also for unlawful cohabitation. Its practical force lay in turning a contested marital practice into a charge federal agents could more readily pursue, and in the arrests and resistance that followed it became a visible point of collision between national law and Mormon authority.

Background: Competing Legal Orders

The Act entered a territory where federal and church authority already contended over who could define and administer the law. Because Utah remained a territory, legal power was supposed to reside in federal courts. The Utah Territorial Legislature, dominated by Mormons, had expanded local probate courts, which Brigham Young controlled, and thereby usurped federal jurisdiction. Bishops commonly served as probate judges, while juries were made up almost entirely of Mormons who based verdicts on instructions from church leaders. Federal officials complained that Brigham Young had turned the territory into a theocratic dictatorship; the local legal system was thus a central part of the dispute the Act sought to confront.

The political pressure for federal action grew after President Hayes visited Great Salt Lake City in 1880 and urged Congress to restrict voting, public office, and jury service in Utah to people who neither practiced nor upheld polygamy. Congress passed legislation over the following fifteen years. The Edmunds Act was an early measure in that campaign, extending prosecution beyond plural marriage to unlawful cohabitation, a charge described as easier to prove.

Enforcement and Its Reach

After the Act passed, Utah’s polygamists were derogatorily called “cohabs,” and federal agents carried out cohabitation hunts in towns across the territory. By the late 1880s, approximately one thousand Saints had been jailed. The change in the law therefore reached beyond formal plural marriages: it supplied a prosecutable category through which federal authorities could pursue people living in relationships the government treated as unlawful.

The enforcement effort did not end Mormon defiance. Going to prison on a polygamy conviction could become a source of pride among Saints, revealing how punishment could be recast within the community as evidence of religious commitment. Federal prosecution and religious loyalty thus reinforced their conflict rather than settling which authority would prevail.

Resistance and Dispersal

Mormon leaders responded to mounting pressure by sending increasing numbers of Saints to distant settlements in the American West and to Mexico and Canada, seeking places where plural marriage could continue with less fear of arrest. Colonies of “cohabs” developed in Cardston, Alberta, and in Mexico near the Sierra Madre Occidental. John Taylor himself went into hiding after a warrant was issued for his arrest in 1885. In 1886, while still defying federal pressure, he married his sixteenth wife, who was twenty-six; Taylor was seventy-eight.

The response shows the Act’s consequences were not confined to courtrooms. Enforcement helped push plural-marriage households and their leaders toward settlements beyond the immediate reach of federal agents, while the church continued to assert that its religious obligations outranked national restrictions.

Place in the Wider Campaign

The Edmunds Act formed part of a longer escalation, not a final settlement. In 1887 Congress passed the more severe Edmunds-Tucker Bill. Four months later Taylor died while still in hiding, and federal lawyers began proceedings intended to bankrupt the Mormon Church. The Supreme Court’s 1890 ruling allowed church holdings to be seized by the government. The Act’s significance lies in the way it sharpened this campaign: by broadening what the government could prosecute, it made federal law more forceful in a territory where church institutions had built a competing system of authority, yet it also met persistent resistance and helped drive the practice into new locations.