Mormon Plural Marriage System

The Mormon Plural Marriage System was both a marriage practice and a claim about who had authority to govern religious life. The book traces its passage from a secret shared with migrating Saints to a public doctrine, then follows the conflicts it generated with the United States, with church members who resisted it, and within families governed by fundamentalist priesthood authority. Across those settings, plural marriage was never simply a private arrangement: it shaped community identity, legal strategy, and the distribution of power over spouses and children.

Secrecy, Migration, and Public Declaration

When the first wagon trains left Nauvoo in February 1846, only a small number of emigrants knew that church leaders practiced plural marriage. The doctrine was disclosed to the wider body of Saints at Sugar Creek, Iowa, after they had crossed the Mississippi River and paused to regroup. Beyond the migrating community, however, Brigham Young and his counselors denied that Mormons practiced polygamy. The book describes this public denial as a deliberate strategy that continued even after the Saints had settled in the Great Salt Lake Valley.

That secrecy belonged to a longer struggle over the kind of authority the church could exercise. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith headed a city with unusually broad sovereign powers under a charter granted by Illinois. He was officially invested with religious and political authority, and commanded the Nauvoo Legion. The resulting concentration of church and civic power provides important context for the system’s later history: the practice of plural marriage developed within a movement seeking not only religious freedom, but also room to organize community life according to its own understanding of divine authority.

Brigham Young began to acknowledge plural marriage publicly in stages. On February 4, 1851, while addressing the territorial legislature as governor, he admitted that he had multiple wives. On August 29, 1852, at a churchwide assembly in Salt Lake City, he presented the doctrine more widely and connected it to Joseph Smith’s 1843 revelation concerning celestial marriage. The public announcement changed the practice’s status within the church: a doctrine previously concealed from many members and denied to outsiders was now openly advanced as religious teaching.

Acceptance, Opposition, and Religious Liberty

The announcement produced sharply different responses within and beyond the Mormon community. Converts in France and England were shocked, and the flow of new converts from Europe to Utah diminished. One missionary reported that 1,776 British Saints left the church during the six months following the 1852 announcement. Among Utah Mormons, by contrast, the doctrine gained broad acceptance as an ideal, even though only a minority practiced plural marriage. By 1855, church leaders were pressing the faithful to accept it and warning of religious consequences for those who rejected it.

Outside Utah, plural marriage met sustained condemnation. Many Americans regarded it as morally repugnant, and the book describes public criticism continuing for decades. Brigham Young answered that plural marriage could prevent adultery and prostitution, and also argued that it was not principally a matter of sexual gratification but a religious means of raising a priesthood. He framed the practice as protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, insisting that outsiders had no right to interfere with a sacred doctrine.

These claims placed religious freedom in direct conflict with state law. Plural marriage was a felony elsewhere in the Union, but Brigham Young maintained that God’s law took precedence over the laws of men. The disagreement was therefore not only over the morality of a marriage practice. It was also over jurisdiction: whether civil authorities could enforce a common legal standard, or whether a religious community could arrange its own legal and social order when its leaders believed that divine obligations required it.

Local Law and the Organization of Authority

Utah’s territorial status made that conflict concrete. Federal courts were supposed to hold legal power, but the Mormon-dominated Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Brigham Young controlled. Many probate judges were bishops, and juries were composed almost entirely of Mormons who followed church leaders’ instructions. In the book’s account, these courts offered a means by which local religious authority could shape legal outcomes when church teachings and federal authority collided.

This structure connected doctrine to governance. The issue was not simply that church members privately disagreed with a law; local institutions could give religious authority an operational advantage within the territory. Federal officials complained that Brigham Young had turned Utah into a theocratic dictatorship. Most eventually left, citing harassment and fear, while the book also reports that an undocumented number of federal agents were killed. Plural marriage thus became part of a wider contest over whether the territory’s institutions answered to federal law or to the church leadership that dominated local life.

The book also shows the doctrine operating within later fundamentalist communities under different conditions. In Colorado City, Uncle Rulon’s authority extended over civic employees and community institutions, and sermons emphasized submission. The community’s members regarded state and federal governments as hostile, yet its polygamous households made use of public assistance. To avoid prosecution, men typically legally married only their first wives; later wives were spiritually married but remained single mothers in the eyes of the state. This arrangement allowed large families to qualify for welfare and other public support even as the community opposed the governments providing it.

Kinship, Family Control, and Consequences

The later examples show how plural marriage could reorganize kinship as well as marital status. In Bountiful, Debbie Palmer was married as a teenager to community leader Ray Blackmore, who was fifty-seven and already had five wives. She became his sixth wife and a stepmother to thirty-one children, most older than she was. Because Blackmore was also the father of her stepmother, the marriage made her a stepmother to that stepmother. The book presents these tangled relationships as part of ordinary family life in the polygamist community, not as a simple exception to its structure.

A more extended sequence of marriages and transfers surrounded Alaire Blackmore. Adopted by Ray Blackmore, she was later married to him, making her both a cowife and stepdaughter to Debbie Palmer. After Ray’s death she was married to Debbie’s father; when Winston Blackmore assumed leadership, she was taken from him and married to Winston, her adoptive brother. The account demonstrates how marriage, adoption, step-kinship, and leadership could intersect, and how family relationships could be rearranged as authority shifted.

In Colorado City, the claimed authority over families could be explicit. According to UEP doctrine as described in the book, wives did not belong to their husbands and children did not belong to their parents; the priesthood could claim them. When DeLoy Bateman left the religious community, Uncle Rulon ordered that his wives and children be taken from him and assigned to another man. Both wives refused to leave, and all of DeLoy’s children except the three oldest were also treated as apostates. Their decision reveals the personal stakes behind the doctrine: the community’s authority to allocate family relationships could be challenged by the people expected to submit to it.

The system’s meaning therefore changes across the book’s different settings. In the nineteenth-century church, it was defended as a divinely ordained doctrine and a test of religious liberty, provoking conflict with public opinion and federal authority. In later fundamentalist communities, it also operated through local power over marriage, kinship, and family membership. The recurring tension is between a religious institution’s claim to order family life and the competing claims of civil law and individual family bonds.