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The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America

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Description

From the Mormon Church’s public announcement of its sanction of polygamy in 1852 until its formal decision to abandon the practice in 1890, people on both sides of the “Mormon question” debated central questions of constitutional law. Did principles of religious freedom and local self-government offer protection to Mormons’ claim to a distinct, religiously based legal order? Or used to be polygamy, as its opponents claimed, a new type of slavery–this time for white women in Utah? And did constitutional principles dictate that democracy and true liberty were founded on separation of church and state?

As Sarah Barringer Gordon shows, the answers to these questions in the end yielded an apparent victory for antipolygamists within the late nineteenth century, but only after decades of argument, litigation, and open conflict. Victory came at a price; as attention and national resources poured into Utah within the late 1870s and 1880s, antipolygamists turned increasingly more to coercion and punishment within the name of freedom. Additionally they left a legacy in constitutional law and political theory that still governs our remedy of religious life: Americans are free to imagine, but they are going to well not be free to act on their beliefs.

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