Federal Pressure Forces The 1890 Manifesto

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

By the 1880s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced a legal campaign aimed squarely at ending its practice of plural marriage. The Edmunds-Tucker Act, passed on 3 March 1887, went further than any earlier federal law: it disincorporated the church itself along with its Perpetual Emigration Fund Company, authorized the government to seize church property above fifty thousand dollars, a seizure the Supreme Court upheld in 1890, stripped Utah women of the vote they had held since 1870, and made polygamy a criminal offense.

Facing the dismantling of the church as a legal institution rather than merely the prosecution of individual members, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto in September 1890 announcing that the church would submit to the law and advising members against contracting further plural marriages. The church's general conference formally accepted the manifesto on 6 October 1890, though plural marriages already in place were left undisturbed rather than dissolved outright.

The manifesto opened the path to Utah statehood, achieved in 1896, ending a standoff that had cost the church its legal standing and much of its property. It did not end plural marriage completely: some apostles covertly sanctioned further marriages in the years afterward, a continuation serious enough to prompt a stronger Second Manifesto in 1904. What the 1890 declaration changed was survival as a legal body inside the United States, traded against a practice that had defined the church publicly for decades.