Polygamy

In 19th-century America, jurisdiction for the regulation of marriage was a state concern. This resulted in variations in marital law, particularly with regard to the age at which single individuals could marry and which races could marry one another. Under Euro-American law, however, marriage was, universally, a contract entered into by a single man and single woman. Upon marriage, women surrendered most of their legal rights and capabilities to their husbands. Husbands controlled their wives’ property, any income they earned, their ability to sue, their ability to contract, and sexual access to their bodies. Wives who committed a crime, signed premarital agreements, had trusts created in their name, or appealed to a court with equity jurisdiction could find exceptions to this general rule. In the words of English jurist Sir William Blackstone, however, a wife was ideally considered to be under the legal “wing, protection, and cover" of her husband during marriage. Since women could not vote or be elected to public office, their husbands became their civic representatives. Marriage was the cornerstone of orderly government, prescribing ideal roles for men and women in civil society.

Polygamy, the practice of one man having several wives, was therefore the antithesis of orderly government. From the revolutionary period on, polygamy had been linked with the worst abuses of imperial rule. A husband who took several wives, argued theorists, was akin to a political despot whose power was predicated on the negation of other people’s liberty. Bigamy and polygamy were abuses of the roles and responsibilities inherent within the marriage contract—the equal exchange of obligation and privilege between one man and one woman.

Polygamy was a moral and political issue to 19th-century Americans, who looked upon its practice in certain Native American communities as a sign of the latter’s uncivilized state of being. Transforming Indian marital practices to mirror those of Euro-Americans was a central priority of the government and of missionary organizations throughout the 19th century. By transforming MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE, they hoped to transform tribal culture. Since Euro-American marriage was weighted with civic meaning, replacing polygamy with monogamy was a stepping-stone to replacing tribal government with a democratic civil order.

It was the practice of polygamy in Utah’s Mormon communities, however, that gave many Americans their greatest concern. While settled in Illinois in 1843, JoSEPH Smith, Jr., the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ OF Latter-day Saints, received a vision in which Mormons were instructed to practice polygamy. It was nine more years before the revelation was widely known, by which time the Saints had migrated to Utah and Smith had died. While only the wealthiest Mormon men could afford to have several wives, the fact remained that polygamy was being practiced in a U. S. territory. Many Americans were outraged.

For the Mormons, the issue was one of states’ rights. The regulation of marriage was of state concern, and the territorial government of Utah resisted attempts to force it to outlaw the practice. As a states’ rights issue, the Mormons theoretically should have enjoyed southern support, as the right of a state to regulate domestic law was central to the South’s defense of slavery. Southern members of Congress, however, rejected such comparisons, preferring to paint polygamy as northern liberalism run amok. They were aided in this decision by northern arguments that compared slavery and polygamy. Slaveholders were, argued many northern politicians, no better than polygamous husbands themselves, since their female slaves were under their sexual control as much as their wives. To northerners, slavery and polygamy were both breakdowns of democratic social order. Despite the public outcry and moral outrage on all sides, however, Congress did not outlaw the practice of polygamy until well after the Civil War (1861-65).

Further reading: Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).