The Mormon Question
Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America
Sarah Barringer Gordon
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 01/2003
Pages: 352
Subject: Religion, Law
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807875261
DESCRIPTION
As Sarah Barringer Gordon shows, the answers to these questions finally yielded an apparent victory for antipolygamists in the late nineteenth century, but only after decades of argument, litigation, and open conflict. Victory came at a price; as attention and national resources poured into Utah in the late 1870s and 1880s, antipolygamists turned more and more to coercion and punishment in the name of freedom. They also left a legacy in constitutional law and political theory that still governs our treatment of religious life: Americans are free to believe, but they may well not be free to act on their beliefs.