In the previous two posts in this series, I discussed an 1886 dictated revelation from John Taylor. A related claim to this document that I am addressing here is that when fundamentalist Latter-day Saint groups began to become a religious movement in their own right during the 1910s and 1920s, the leadership of the majority group claimed to have been given authority to perform plural marriages in perpetuity by President John Taylor. It’s uncertain what John Taylor said and did in this regard, but the position of the revelations and praxis of church presidents both before and after Taylor indicate that he did not have the ability to assign that authority in perpetuity.
General Authorization
We do know that during the anti-polygamy crusade of the United States federal government, decentralization of authority to perform plural marriages allowed for plausible deniability on the part of the presidents of the church. For example, during an 1884 trial, John Taylor, president of the church, was brought as a witness to testify whether or not a polygamous marriage had been performed. When asked: “When this authority is conferred upon any one by you, is it an authority limited to some particular case, or a general authority?” President Taylor responded that: “It would be a general authority until rescinded.” When asked: “Who in this city is authorized to celebrate plural marriages?” he stated that: “A great many have been appointed—hundreds.” Further indicating a dilution in centralized control over sealings to plural wives, Taylor stated: “There is no specific place appointed in which marriages occur” and that he recalled many marriages being performed “outside of any one of the Endowment Houses within the past three years.” Finally, when asked if he knew whether the defendant “has taken a plural wife or not,” President Taylor stated that he didn’t know, and he didn’t know if he had any means to find out.[1] If taken as an honest statement, it indicates that the president of the church was not aware of the marriage that had been performed, likely because it had been approved and performed by church leaders at a local level who, as Taylor indicated, had been given general authority to do so.
John Taylor offered further explanation to a congregation in Weber County shortly afterwards. He told them, “I was lately called upon as a witness—perhaps you may have seen some account of it in the papers—and I want to make some explanation in relation to the matters that I then presented, because they are not generally understood.” Referring to plausible deniability, he explained why marriages would be performed without his knowledge: “If they made a confidant of me and I was called before a tribunal, I could not, as an honorable man, reveal their confidences, yet it would be said I was a transgressor of law; but no honorable man can reveal confidences that are committed to him. Therefore I tell them to keep their own secrets.” If he didn’t know that plural marriages happened, he could honestly say he did not know about them in court. He then explained that not all plural marriage sealings had to happen in the temple or Endowment House: “Under such circumstances we perceive that our operations elsewhere will be all correct; it makes no difference. It is the authority of the Priesthood, not the place, that validates and sanctifies the ordinance.”[2]
It is uncertain to what extent John Taylor was telling the truth about giving authority to perform plural marriage sealings without his knowledge and approval. B. H. Roberts dismissed the overall issue by claiming that “the testimony he gave was not material.”[3] Samuel W. Taylor, on the other hand, claimed that this testimony was evidence that “President John Taylor had taken the Principle underground again, and had appointed the organization for its continuance.”[4] B. Carmon Hardy agreed with Samuel Taylor, stating that John Taylor’s testimony was a sign that “license to contract polygamous marriages was delegated to increasing numbers of individuals apart from the church president himself.”[5] While it’s unclear what the reality behind John Taylor’s statements was, there were later circumstances when authority was delegated to specific individuals to perform plural marriages without the president of the church’s knowledge.
Rule of One
Now, giving this type of authorization was something that John Taylor was able to do during his presidency, but the authority to allow it to continue was authority that only his successors had. Early on in the practice of plural marriage, Joseph Smith outlined a “rule of one.” He outlined this rule in a revelation he recorded on July 12, 1843, stating, “There is never but one on the earth at a time, on whom this power and the Keys of this priesthood is confered” and that Joseph Smith was the one to hold the power in his time.[6] To emphasize the point, Joseph Smith indicated that even Hyrum Smith—Joseph’s brother, associate president, patriarch, and right-hand man—did not have the right to use the sealing power without permission. According to Brigham Young, Hyrum Smith sealed Parley P. Pratt to both Mary Ann Frost and Elizabeth Brotherton in Joseph Smith’s absence, and Hyrum was chastised by Joseph, who said that if he did not stop it he would “go to hell and all those he sealed with him.”[7] This would become a precedent for church presidents to enforce their authority as the sole individual allowed to authorize plural marriages.
After Joseph Smith was killed on June 27, 1844, a crisis over who would succeed him as the leader of the church followed. The group most successful in asserting claims to leadership would prove to be the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, with Brigham Young serving as president of the Quorum. They faced challenges to their authority from a few individuals, including William Smith and Sidney Rigdon, who each claimed that they were the rightful heirs to church leadership. Part of their argument was that the Quorum of the Twelve’s leadership differed in kind from that offered by Joseph Smith, since their leadership was presented as a group rather than as an individual. When facing down Sidney Rigdon in August of 1844, Brigham Young stated that there “could not be any one before the Twelve,” and that he was acting “in my capacity in connexion with the quorum of the Twelve as Apostles of Jesus Christ unto the People,” rather than as president of the church. He added that “we have a head, and that head is the Twelve and we can now begin to see the neccessity of the Apostleship.”[8] This complicated the rule of only one person holding the right to authorize plural marriages, since a group of twelve individuals was acting collectively as the head of the church.
Some members of the Quorum felt that it was the right of the president of the Quorum of the Twelve alone to hold the sealing authority. For example, when William Smith began to challenge Brigham Young’s right to oversee plural marriages in the fall of 1844, Wilford Woodruff noted in a letter that he believed the sealing authority “is a right exclusively belonging to the quorum of the Twelve on the president of the Quorum.”[9] In 1845, Brigham Young affirmed in a letter that “the sealing power is always vested in one man . . . [and] all sealings must be performed by the man holding the keys or by his dictation, and that man is the president of the Church.”[10] Again, in July 1846, according to Wilford Woodruff’s journal, members of the Quorum of the Twelve agreed that “no man has a right to Attend to the ordinance of sealing except the President of the Church or those who are directed by him so to do.”[11] In each of these cases, the president of the church was the one man who held the right to the sealing authority. As the president of the quorum that led the church, Brigham Young assumed that he functioned as the president of the church in this regard.
Not all of the apostles, however, did agree. William Smith’s performance of plural marriages without authorization from Brigham Young was a major point of contention between them leading up to Smith’s excommunication. Then Parley P. Pratt and John Taylor performed plural marriages for each other in Winter Quarters while the other members of the Quorum of the Twelve were on the way to Utah in 1847. Because the church was still governed collectively by the Quorum of the Twelve rather than a First Presidency, Pratt believed that “one of them [the Twelve] by reason of age is the President of the Quorum and of the church . . . [but] all the 12 are alike in keys power might majesty & dominion.”[12] Thus, as an apostle, he believed he could perform polygamous marriages without the express permission of the president because he had equal authority to the president. Brigham Young, of course, disagreed—he accused Pratt and Taylor of adultery and declared that they had “committed an insult on the Holy Priesthood.”[13] Their sealings that were performed without Young’s authorization so incensed Young that after Pratt was murdered ten years later, Young stated that when “Bro. Parley’s blood was spilt, I was glad for it for he paid the debt he owed, for he whored.”[14] With Brigham Young’s organization of a First Presidency in late 1847, this point of contention was resolved for the time being.
After John Taylor
While John Taylor had given authority to men to perform plural marriages without his express approval, that authorization was only applicable while he was the one on whom the sealing power and the keys of this priesthood were conferred. Although the Manifestos of 1890 and 1904 signaled the death knell of plural marriage in the long term, some authorized plural marriages continued to be performed until around 1910. Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith would authorize a few individuals in a similar way to what John Taylor had done, but reserved the right to revoke that decision. For example, President Lorenzo Snow authorized the Juárez stake president in northern Mexico to perform plural marriages for residents of the stake without obtaining specific authorization from the First Presidency in 1898. This blanket authorization was rescinded in 1899 by Lorenzo Snow due to political pressure.[15]
An incident in Mexico illustrated that Lorenzo Snow would enforce his authority over sealings over and against other high-ranking members of the Church. After President Snow revoked the authority of the stake president in Mexico, Joseph F. Smith (second counselor in the First Presidency) secretly told the stake patriarch in Juárez (Alexander F. Macdonald) to perform plural marriages for residents of the stake. Apostle John Henry Smith recalled, however, that when word reached Lorenzo Snow of Macdonald performing plural marriages in Mexico, he was told by President Snow that “no man in this earth today is authorized to exercise the keys but myself, and if A. F. McDonald or any other man is doing it and you find out that fact, you [John Henry Smith] are authorized to deal with him or have the church dignitaries of that section deal with him in his fellowship.”[16] John Henry Smith recorded in his diary that he passed this information on to Macdonald: “I had a talk with A. F. McDonald about Sealings and I told him if he was sealing Plural Wifes to men his standing in the church was in danger.”[17] Thus, Lorenzo Snow’s efforts to reassert the “‘rule of one”’ limited some of the efforts to continue plural marriage in secret.
The reason that Smith turned to Macdonald was likely because patriarchs were assumed to have sealing authority by an interpretation of section 124. The revelation stated that, as patriarch, Hyrum Smith would “hold the sealing blessings of my church, even the holy spirit of promise, whereby ye are sealed up unto the day of redemption,” which was taken to mean that patriarchs were delegated the sealing authority.[18] This was taken advantage of by those seeking post-Manifesto plural marriages. For example, when Matthias F. Cowley married Lenora Mary Taylor as his fourth wife in 1905, the ceremony was performed by John Anthony Woolf, a patriarch living in Cardston, Alberta.[19] And when Joseph White Musser married Ellis R. Shipp as a plural wife in 1907, he went to Judson Tolman, a patriarch serving in Utah, to have the sealing performed.[20] While Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had directly rejected this idea in addressing Hyrum Smith’s sealings for Parley Pratt, the interpretation persisted.
Heber J. Grant worked to address this loophole in 1921. In a session of general conference, he stated that “No man upon the face of the earth has any right or any authority to perform a plural marriage, and there are no plural marriages today in the Church of Christ, because no human being has the right to perform them.” Grant continued, “Therefore, any person pretending to have that right is attempting to exercise an authority that he does not have, and therefore he does not perform a marriage and there is no marriage covenant when such ceremonies are performed.” Then, President Grant got more specific about what he was addressing: “We have excommunicated several patriarchs because they arrogated unto themselves, the right, or pretended right, to perform these ceremonies. … I announce that no patriarch has the right to perform any marriages at all in the Church.”[21] Only the president of the church had the right to authorize the sealing ceremonies associated with plural marriage.
In the Third Manifesto of 1933, the First Presidency again affirmed that no one had the authority outside of the president of the Church and that Heber J. Grant and Joseph F. Smith had revoked any and all authority to perform plural marriages:
The keys of the sealing ordinances rest today solely in President Heber J. Grant, having so passed to him by the ordination prescribed by the Lord, at the hands of those having the authority to pass them, and whose authority has never been taken away by the Lord, nor suspended, nor interfered with by the Church. President Grant is the only man on the earth at this time who possesses these keys. He has never authorized any one to perform polygamous or plural marriages; he is not performing such marriages himself; he has not on his part violated nor is he violating the pledge he made to the Church, to the world, and to our government at the time of the Manifesto.
Any one making statements contrary to the foregoing is innocently or maliciously telling that which is not true. Any one representing himself as authorized to perform such marriages is making a false representation. Any such ceremony performed by any person so making such representation is a false and mock ceremony. Those living as husband and wife under and pursuant to the ceremonies proscribed by President Smith or the ceremonies performed by any person whatsoever since that proscription, are living in adultery and are subject to the attaching penalties.[22]
After about 1910, all authority to perform plural marriages was withdrawn from members of the Church.
Conclusion
In conclusion, while the decentralization of authority to perform plural marriages under John Taylor allowed fundamentalist groups to claim continuity, historical evidence demonstrates that such authority was always contingent upon the living president of the Church. The precedent set by Joseph Smith and reinforced by Brigham Young and later Church leaders firmly established the “rule of one,” wherein only the presiding prophet holds the keys to sealing authority. Efforts to continue polygamy after the Manifestos were ultimately curtailed through systematic revocations and clarifications by Church leadership, culminating in firm declarations under Heber J. Grant. Thus, any claims to independent plural marriage authority after the early twentieth century stand in direct contradiction to established Church governance and doctrine.
For other posts in this series, please visit the “Chad Nielsen on Plural Marriage” page.
Footnotes:
[1] “The Polygamy Trial,” Deseret Evening News, October. 18, 1884.
[2] John Taylor, October 19, 1884, Journal of Discourses, 25:355.
[3] B. H. Roberts, The Life of John Taylor: Third President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1892), 371.
[4] Samuel W. Taylor, The Kingdom or Nothing: The Life of John Taylor, Militant Mormon (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976), 310.
[5] B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 52.
[6] “Revelation, 12 July 12, 1843 [D&C 132],” p. [1], The Joseph Smith Papers, accessed April 21, 2023, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-12-july-1843-dc-132/1. Compare with D&C 132:7.
[7] Brigham Young to William Smith, August 10, 1845, Brigham Young office files, 1832–1878 (bulk 1844–1877); General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876; 1845 June–August; Church History LibraryCHL, https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/a0a1a911-3045-4807-abfe-23d34f16ce3c/0/38 (accessed: September 12, 2021).
[8] “Journal (January 1, 1843 – December 31, 1844),” August 7, 1844 – August 8, 1844, The Wilford Woodruff Papers, accessed May 1, 2023, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/p/7JB.
[9] Wilford Woodruff to Brigham Young, October 9–14, 1844, Brigham Young Collection, CHL, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. (CHL).
[10] Brigham Young to William Smith, August 10, 1845, Brigham Young Collection, CHL.
[11] Wilford Woodruff, “Journal (January 1, 1845 – December 31, 1846),” July 20, 1846 – July 24, 1846, The Wilford Woodruff Papers (July 24, 1846), accessed April 24, 2023, https://wilfordwoodruffpapers.org/p/Dk6Y.
[12] Parley P. Pratt Discourse, May 23, 1847, General Church Minutes, CHL.
[13] “Minutes of Councils, Meetings, & Journey,” November 16, 1847. Cited in Gary James Bergera, Conflict in the Quorum: Orson Pratt, Brigham Young, Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 58.
[14] Historian’s Office General Church Minutes, 1839–1877; 1861–1877; 1865 May–September; Salt Lake City, May 1, 1865, CHL.
[15] Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890–1904,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Vol 18 No. 1 (1985): 57–58, 65–88. See also B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 168.
[16] Testimony of John Henry Smith in Smoot Case 2:304–306; John Henry Smith, Diary, 22 April 22, 27 May 27, 1901.
[17] John Henry Smith Diaries, May 27, 1901. See Church State and Politics: The Diaries of John Henry Smith, ed. Jean Bickmore White (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1990), 485.
[18] Joseph Smith, “Revelation, 19 January 1841 [D&C 124],” online typescript (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/revelation-19-january-1841-dc-124/11), 13.
[19] Anthony W. Ivins Diaries, 25 January 25,. 1911, Anthony Woodward Ivins Collection, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, UT. See also Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 209.
[20] Cristina M. Rosetti, Joseph White Musser: A Mormon Fundamentalist (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2024), 10.
[21] Heber J. Grant, in Ninety-First Annual Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1921), 202.
[22] Published in the Deseret News, Church Section,17 June 1933. See also Messages of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed. James R. Clark (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft Inc., 1971), 5:315-330.
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