Two Manifestos, and the Groups That Refused Them

The federal response escalated over three decades. Congress made bigamy in the territories a crime in 1862, the Supreme Court upheld that law against a free exercise defence in the Reynolds case, and the Edmunds Act of 1882 disqualified plural husbands from voting, from juries and from office. The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 went further and dissolved the church as a corporation, seizing its property. By 1890 the church faced the loss of its temples.

Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto in September 1890, advising members to contract no marriage forbidden by the law of the land, and it was accepted by the church in conference. It was a short document and it did not end the practice at once: new plural marriages continued to be performed by some authorities, particularly outside the United States, and the resulting controversy contributed to the Senate hearings on whether Reed Smoot could take his seat. Joseph F. Smith issued a second manifesto in 1904 with explicit penalties, after which the church excommunicated those who continued.

The church today excommunicates members who enter plural marriage. Groups that rejected the Manifesto separated and continue the practice, of which the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the largest and best known, and there are others with no organisational relation to it. The term celestial marriage remains in ordinary Latter-day Saint use for a marriage sealed in the temple for eternity, which is now always between one man and one woman.