Victorian era

The Victorian era is the book’s frame for the widening conflict between Mormon plural marriage and the moral expectations of the United States. The practice was not a marginal curiosity within the early church: after Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, Brigham Young led the Saints west and their community openly embraced plural marriage. To many Americans, it seemed a brutal custom comparable to slavery; to its defenders, it was a religious covenant and a matter of who had authority to govern the faithful.

Public Morality and Plural Marriage

The conflict entered national politics in 1856, when Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont pledged to prohibit what his platform called the territories’ twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery. The pairing captures the force of the public indictment. Plural marriage was debated not only as a private marital practice, but as a sign of a social order that many Americans considered incompatible with their own moral and political ideals.

That opposition did not make the Saints’ commitment to the practice disappear. Brigham Young defended it as a sacred religious principle and rejected the authority of outsiders to interfere. The dispute therefore turned on competing claims: the country treated polygamy as a public wrong subject to law, while Mormon leaders treated it as a divine command protected from external control.

A Religious Government and Competing Laws

The book places this contest within the political institutions built by the Saints. In Nauvoo, Joseph Smith had presided over a theocratic city with unusual sovereign powers under its charter. Later, under Brigham Young, the Saints’ government in Deseret asserted that God’s law took precedence over human law, particularly laws imposed by non-Mormons.

Utah’s territorial status made that principle an institutional contest as well as a theological one. The Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Brigham controlled, at the expense of federal jurisdiction. Mormon bishops commonly served as probate judges, and Mormon juries were instructed in verdicts in accordance with church leaders’ directions. Federal officials protested that the arrangement had made the territory a theocratic dictatorship; local courts, meanwhile, gave church authority practical force in legal disputes.

Federal Confrontation and Political Change

In 1857, President James Buchanan sent the United States Army to Utah with the stated aims of dismantling Brigham Young’s theocracy and eradicating polygamy. The resulting Utah War achieved neither: Brigham remained in power, and plural marriage continued. The failed intervention did not settle the question, but it set the stage for a lengthier sequence of judicial and legislative challenges.

That pressure culminated in the 1887 Edmunds-Tucker Act, which disincorporated the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and transferred to the federal government church property valued above $50,000. The Saints ultimately renounced polygamy publicly in 1890. Yet the public declaration did not mark an immediate end to the practice: church leaders quietly sent groups to establish polygamous colonies in Mexico and Canada, and some senior authorities continued plural marriages in secret well into the twentieth century.

The Era’s Afterlife

The institutional change eventually went beyond public renunciation. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted a more pragmatic approach to American politics, rejected polygamy, and began urging government agencies to prosecute those who practiced it. The book presents this policy shift as central to the church’s transformation from a community widely regarded as a sect outside the American mainstream into a conventional and highly successful faith.

The Victorian-era dispute thus survives in the book as more than a historical clash over marriage. It exposes the competing legal and religious orders that formed around plural marriage, and the compromises through which one institution secured broader public acceptance. Later fundamentalist communities continued to defend plural marriage as a protected religious belief, showing that the end of official church support did not erase the underlying conflict over religious liberty, state authority, and the right to practice the faith.