Item Detail
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13282
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9
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0
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English
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'The Twin Relic of Barbarism' : A Legal History of Anti-Polygamy in Nineteenth Century America
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Princeton University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"The "twin relics of barbarism" were the 1856 Republican party platform's label for polygamy and slavery. Republicans called for the prohibition by the national government of both the peculiar domestic relations of Mormon Utah and of slaveholding territories. Anti-polygamy was thus profoundly related to anti-slavery in its origin, yet followed a very different trajectory. The anti-polygamy campaign brought together diverse, divergent and shifting constituencies in the second half of the nineteenth century, including novelists, congressmen, lecturers, territorial officials, lawyers, and Supreme Court Justices. Above all, anti-polygamists were troubled by a perceived crisis in marriage. Mormon polygamy provided a meeting ground, a place for debating the political importance of marriage, the role of women in politics, the interdependence of monogamy, democracy and civilization. Anti-polygamists not only criminalized plural marriage in the territories in 1862, they also redefined the role of religion in political life. The evils of a union of church and state were manifest in Utah, they claimed. The second wave of disestablishment, now at the federal level and as a matter of constitutional principle, sharply curtailed the institutional power of churches, all, paradoxically, in the interests of Christian marriage. Mormon resistance to anti-polygamy legislation and disestablishment frustrated their opponents. Polygamists claimed they had access to a higher law than anything Congress could enact (or enforce). The challenge to national authority was palpable, and largely successful until the mid-1880s. The turn to coercion added new levels of punishment, both political and property-based. Polygamists were disqualified from voting and sitting on juries; their church was dispossessed of many of its assets. The Supreme Court, to which the Mormons turned with some confidence, given the Court's record on the other relic of barbarism, not only sustained anti-polygamy legislation, but created a jurisprudence of family, church-state relations, and federal power. In 1890, the Mormons formally abandoned claims of right to disobey positive law. The victory was largely symbolic; yet it also represented the culmination of four decades of sustained ideological work, the sorting out of the role of marriage as a constituent element of national identity." [Author's abstract]
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A Foreign Kingdom : Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890
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