When hostility moved from mobs into law.
The story of injustice against Latter-day Saints did not end when the era of open mob expulsion began to fade. In the second half of the nineteenth century, public hostility toward the Saints was increasingly expressed through legislation, court decisions, disenfranchisement, surveillance, confiscation, and federal pressure. The result was a different form of persecution — less immediate than a massacre, but still deeply consequential.
What changed after the frontier era.
In Missouri and Illinois, persecution often arrived through mobs, armed intimidation, and forced removal. In the later anti-polygamy era, pressure increasingly arrived through statutes, prosecutions, court rulings, and federal oversight. The methods changed, but the underlying pattern did not disappear. A religious minority still found itself treated as a public problem to be controlled rather than a people to be protected.
This matters because it broadens the story of injustice. Persecution is not only a matter of riots and bloodshed. It can also take the form of targeted legal burdens, civil disabilities, political exclusion, and economic coercion. When hostility is embedded in law, it often becomes more durable, more respectable, and harder to recognize as persecution at all.
The anti-polygamy era.
The anti-polygamy era unfolded over decades. In 1862, Congress passed the Morrill Act for the Suppression of Polygamy, which punished bigamy with a fine and up to five years in prison. The law was not heavily enforced at first because of the Civil War, but it established a legal framework for increasingly aggressive federal action in later years.
That pressure intensified through later laws. The Edmunds Act of 1882 punished unlawful cohabitation with a fine or six months’ imprisonment, and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 increased penalties, targeted the Church itself, revoked women’s voting rights in Utah, and stripped the Church of property rights over assets above $50,000. These measures did not simply regulate private conduct. They signaled a determination to break the social, political, and institutional strength of the Saints.
Property seizures and legal pressure.
One of the clearest examples of government pressure was the use of property law against the Church. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act made it illegal for the Church to own property worth more than $50,000 beyond what was used exclusively for religious purposes. Later, the Edmunds-Tucker Act dissolved the corporation of the Church and directed that Church property over $50,000 be forfeited to the government.
This legal pressure was not abstract. President Wilford Woodruff later explained that if plural marriage continued in defiance of federal law, the Saints faced the confiscation of temples and personal property, the imprisonment of leaders and heads of families, and the interruption of temple ordinances across the Church.
Civil disabilities and disenfranchisement.
Government pressure also took the form of civil disability — the removal of ordinary civic rights. The Edmunds Act of 1882 disqualified polygamous men and women from voting. Five years later, the Edmunds-Tucker Act disenfranchised all Utah women, whether or not they practiced plural marriage.
That loss was especially striking because Utah women had already been voting since 1870. Utah women were among the first in the United States to cast votes in municipal elections, only to have that right rescinded by the federal government in 1887 as part of the anti-polygamy campaign. In other words, the legal struggle was not confined to plural households. It reached outward into the political rights of the territory more broadly.
Public hostility encoded into law.
This era matters because it shows how public hostility can be translated into official policy. Exaggerated press portrayals and sensationalized accounts helped stir anti-polygamy feeling nationally, while politicians moved to eliminate the practice through law. What began as public outrage became a legislative program.
Court decisions also mattered. In Reynolds v. United States, George Reynolds argued the anti-bigamy statute violated the Constitution’s protection of free exercise because plural marriage was, in his understanding, a religious duty. The Supreme Court rejected that argument and treated the question as whether religious belief could justify an overt act made criminal by law. Whatever one thinks of that ruling, it helped establish the legal framework within which religiously motivated conduct could be sharply restricted.
Family disruption, surveillance, and “the raid.”
The anti-polygamy campaign was felt in ordinary homes. Many Latter-day Saints responded to the new laws with civil disobedience, and the federal government answered with what families called “the raid.” Men went into hiding, moved between homes, assumed aliases, or relocated to remote settlements to avoid arrest. Pregnant women sometimes hid in order to avoid being subpoenaed against their husbands, and children sometimes lived under assumed names or in fear of being forced to testify against parents.
This section of the story matters because it reminds us that legal campaigns do not stay confined to courtrooms. Laws reach kitchens, farms, marriages, pregnancies, childhoods, and family economies.
Public hostility made respectable.
One of the hardest truths in this history is that legal persecution often appears more civilized than mob violence while still doing deep harm. A mob attack looks obviously unjust. A statute, commission, prosecution, or court ruling can appear orderly and principled even when it is shaped by fear, contempt, exaggeration, or the desire to weaken a religious minority.
That is part of what this page is meant to reveal. The legal pressure against the Saints did not only concern criminal penalties. It reached voting rights, corporate existence, property control, family stability, and public legitimacy. Law became one of the main ways social hostility was made durable.
What this teaches about minority faiths.
This history teaches that minority faiths can be pressured in more than one register. Sometimes the danger is open violence. Sometimes it is ridicule and sensationalism. Sometimes it is the quiet accumulation of laws, penalties, and civil exclusions that make a people more vulnerable while preserving the appearance of public order.
It also teaches that remembering such periods requires care. The Church no longer practices plural marriage; it was publicly discontinued beginning in 1890 and is strictly prohibited today. But the end of that practice does not erase the historical fact that anti-Latter-day Saint hostility was at times written into law in ways that affected property, voting, imprisonment, and family life.
Why this still matters.
This page still matters because it prevents the larger story from becoming too narrow. If the persecution of Latter-day Saints is remembered only in terms of Missouri mobs, Carthage, or frontier exile, then an entire second form of pressure disappears from view. Legal discrimination and government coercion become easy to forget because they wear the clothing of process, order, and official authority.
Remembering this history does not require endorsing every practice involved in the conflict. It requires recognizing that a minority faith can be targeted not only by violence outside the state, but also by pressure exercised through the state itself.
Document Highlight — Where to start in the archive
Visitors who want to explore this history more deeply should begin with the anti-polygamy legislation overview, the Reynolds materials, the women’s suffrage and disenfranchisement records, and the Manifesto documents.
- Antipolygamy Legislation — overview of federal laws and the raid
- Reynolds v. United States — religious belief and criminal law
- Disenfranchisement / Women’s Suffrage — civil disabilities in Utah
- Official Declaration 1 / Manifesto — the turn toward compliance
Read the laws. Trace the pressure. Remember that persecution can look official.
Explore the records, follow the legal timeline, and see why the history of injustice against Latter-day Saints must include not only mob violence and expulsion, but also the years when hostility was written into law and enforced through government power.