| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. By Sarah Barringer Gordon. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xiv, 337 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2661-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4987-1.)

In her beautifully crafted study The Mormon Question, Sarah Barringer Gordon explores the constitutional and legislative foundations for current debates over marriage, morality, and law. She analyzes conflicts between religious and temporal authorities in the nineteenth century with a keen eye to the connections among major political issues, including slavery, states' rights, religious disestablishment, territorial governance, monopolies, woman suffrage, the Indian question, and Chinese exclusion. 1

Gordon re-creates the passionate debates between anti- and pro-polygamy forces over faith and law, monogamy and democracy, localism and federalism. The struggle was more than discursive. In the 1840s, the federal government claimed it was powerless to intervene when Mormons were attacked, their property destroyed, and their leader murdered in Nauvoo, Illinois. The decision of their new leader, Brigham Young, to move his flock west and establish a spiritual home in a territory where church members constituted the political majority followed on that logic of federalism. . . .

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