John Taylor—John W. Woolley

John Taylor’s connection to John W. Woolley joined a private refuge to a public religious rupture: at Woolley’s home, while evading federal officers, Taylor declared that God had not revoked the commandment of plural marriage. The account makes the household a setting for revelation, witness, and organized commitment, and presents the resulting covenant as one foundation of Mormon Fundamentalism.

Refuge and Revelation

On September 26, 1886, Taylor was hiding in the home of John W. Woolley while federal officers pursued people suspected of unlawful cohabitation. The setting matters to their relationship: Woolley provided refuge, and the revelation that Taylor said he received there became a direct challenge to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ movement away from plural marriage. Taylor had asked God whether Joseph Smith’s earlier revelation on the practice should be abandoned. The answer, as Taylor reported it, was that divine commandments remained binding unless God or his authority revoked them, and that this law had not been revoked.

The narrative conveys the claim through a report from Woolley’s son, Lorin. During the night, Lorin noticed light beneath the door of Taylor’s room and heard what he remembered as three distinct voices. In the morning, he recalled that Taylor seemed unusually bright when he emerged. When Lorin asked whom Taylor had been speaking with, Taylor said he had spent the night in conversation with Joseph Smith and identified Jesus Christ as the third voice. These details establish the revelation as an experience witnessed indirectly within the Woolley household: Lorin observed signs and heard an explanation, while Taylor supplied their sacred meaning.

From Household Account to Covenant

Taylor did not leave the revelation as a private assertion between himself and his hosts. He called trusted Saints to a meeting that included John W. Woolley and Lorin C. Woolley, along with ten others. There, Taylor shared what he said God had revealed and placed those present under a covenant to defend celestial or plural marriage, dedicating their lives, liberty, and property to its support. John W. Woolley thus appears not only as the person who sheltered Taylor, but also as a participant in the group bound to preserve the practice.

Taylor warned the assembled Saints that faithfulness could bring ostracism and expulsion from the Church, and might even cost some of them their lives. The warning linked the covenant to anticipated conflict: its members were being asked to uphold a religious obligation despite social, institutional, and legal consequences. Taylor then authorized five of those present, including John W. Woolley and Lorin C. Woolley, to perform celestial marriages and to ordain others to do so. The stated purpose was continuity, so that plural marriage would not cease to produce children. A claim made in a family home thereby acquired an organizational mechanism and a succession beyond the original gathering.

Competing Religious and Legal Authority

The episode belongs to a wider conflict over which authority should govern marriage. Plural marriage was illegal, while the Saints who defended it treated divine commandments as superior to civil law. The account describes Brigham Young’s government in Deseret as arranging local legal power to favor church authority: Mormon-dominated probate courts and juries could decide cases according to instructions from church leaders. That earlier assertion of religious jurisdiction helps explain why Taylor’s covenant was more than a defense of an individual custom. It claimed that a religious obligation remained in force even as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints approached official abandonment of the practice.

The later movement’s argument depended on distinguishing suspension from revocation. Fundamentalists maintained that the 1890 Manifesto had not erased Joseph Smith’s revelation on plural marriage, and they treated Taylor’s declaration as confirmation that the commandment endured. In this account, the authority of Taylor’s claim rested both on the reported revelation and on the group’s collective covenant. John W. Woolley’s role therefore connected the personal conditions of refuge with a larger effort to transmit religious authority outside the Church’s changing policy.

Dispute and Legacy

The meeting lasted eight hours, and Taylor concluded by prophesying that during the seventh president’s tenure the Church would enter temporal and spiritual bondage, after which the figure called the One Mighty and Strong would come. The book presents the meeting as a seedbed of Mormon Fundamentalism: four years later, when the Church sustained the Manifesto and ended official support for plural marriage, those who accepted Taylor’s covenant refused to follow the new course.

The account also notes that the meeting’s authenticity has been angrily disputed by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints General Authorities. Its legacy is therefore contested rather than universally accepted. The narrative associates the revelation with September 26, 1886, and identifies September 27 as a sacred date for later fundamentalists, including Dan Lafferty and residents of Colorado City. Through John W. Woolley, Taylor’s declaration is remembered not simply as a pronouncement but as an event rooted in a particular household, witnessed by members of that household, and carried forward through covenant and delegated authority.