The Prosecutions Begin: Defining Cohabitation in 1885

Abstract

The prosecution of George Reynolds in the mid-1870s and the United States Supreme Court's 1879 affirmation of that conviction are usually viewed as the key legal events leading to mass prosecution of Mormon polygamists in the late 1880s.While Reynolds v. the United States (1879) seemed to dispose of the crucial first amendment defense relied upon by the Mormons, it did not lead to the prosecutions.Rather, they were triggered by the passage of thé Edmunds Act in 1882 as well as a major Supreme Court decision in 1885 over the cohabitation prosecution of Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon.When Reynolds was first prosecuted in 1875 there was no crime of cohabitation on the federal statute books.Only polygamy was a crime and could not be prosecuted without proof of a marriage ceremony, evidence almost impossible for prosecutors to secure.Enforcement of the anti-polygamy laws in Utah was a "dead letter."At least until 1885 and the Angus Cannon prosecution.When Brigham Young and Orson Pratt delivered the first public sermons on polygamy in August 1852 (Arlington 1985, 226; Van Wagoner 1986, 84), they were making public a principle revealed to Joseph Smith, Jr., in 1843 (D&C 132) but practiced with the greatest secrecy (Van Wagoner 1986, 1-69;Foster 1974).The sermons set in motion events that resulted in forty years of confrontation with the federal government and would threaten the Church's very existence.In spite of later national outrage, it was apparently not a crime in the early Utah Territory for a man to marry more than one woman at a time.