Stephen C. Taysom

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WHQ online. About 525 words from this article are provided below; about 12230 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the Western Historical Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase this article in PDF form for $10.00.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the Western Historical Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the Western Historical Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Stephen C. Taysom | "There is always a way of escape": Continuity and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century Mormon Boundary Maintenance Strategies | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.2 | The History Cooperative

"There is always a way of escape": Continuity and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century Mormon Boundary Maintenance Strategies

Mormon historiography typically views the Manifesto of 1890, which officially ended the practice of plural marriage, as a major rupture of Mormon belief and behavioral patterns. This essay reexamines that idea and argues that the process that ended plural marriage displays continuity with other events in early Mormon history.

IN THE INTRODUCTION to her magisterial study of the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick described the appeal of the Turner thesis to earlier historians. Historians of the West, unlike those studying the American colonial period or the American South, were "left without a major turning point." In an effort to fill that need, "[they] had to create one." The closing of the frontier in 1890 thus became a constructed watershed, designed to serve the purposes that the natural watersheds of national independence and the end of the Civil War provided for other fields.¹ Limerick's work offered a call to other historians to examine widely-held assumptions about the narrative structures that are often accepted with little question.

In the spirit of Limerick's probing critique of the Turner thesis, this essay explores the soundness of accepting 1890 as a key historiographical watershed for Mormon history. A hallmark of the traditional approach to Mormon historiography has been to divide Mormon history into two large pieces: the early period when the group existed in tension with American culture and the later period during which Mormonism transformed itself into a conservative, quintessentially American movement. These periods are bisected by the decade of the 1890s. In the first year of that decade, the LDS Church officially abandoned the practice of plural marriage; within the decade Utah became a state, and the Mormons grafted themselves into the American political and economic system and ended their stance of "selective pacifism" by sending Mormon conscripts to fight in the Spanish American War.² These changes were momentous to be sure, but there is evidence to suggest that the patterns of decision-making that brought about some of these changes were not new at all. Specifically, this article examines one dimension of the Mormon experience in the 1890s, the decision to end the practice of plural marriage, in the context of earlier moments in Mormon history.

The process involved in the abandonment of plural marriage was substantially the same as that employed by the church in at least two similar instances in the past: the selection, settlement, and abandonment of "Zion" in Missouri and the exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846. This process, nineteenth-century Mormonism's response to tension and pressure, consists of three phases: the assertion of an ideal, external pressure met with internal resistance, and finally, external pressure met with internal accommodation. The last phase is more than simply a case of rank accommodation, however. The boundaries that are dissolved are reconstituted in new ways. One of the points that Limerick argued for the American West in general, this article seeks to argue for Mormonism in particular: that beneath the historiographical insistence on rupture, there exist surprising continuities.

. . .

There are about 12230 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.