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 City it became increasingly difficult for the Mormon authorities to prevent trade with gentile stores in the city; and in 1869 there was incorporated the Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institution, to which practically all retailers in the territory were forced to sell out. In 1869 the Pacific Railroad reached Salt Lake City and by lessening its isolation, lessened its control by Young. His power was shaken somewhat, and the general tone of Mormonism was improved greatly by the “Godbeite movement,” led by W. S. Godbe and E. L. T. Harrison, who with T. B. H. Stenhouse, author of The Rocky Mountain Saints (1874), Edward W. Tullidge, who wrote an official History of Salt Lake City, and others, had established in 1868 the Utah Magazine, which attacked Young’s despotism. Although Godbe and Harrison were “cut off” from the Church they succeeded in founding the Salt Lake Tribune (1870), the first permanent protest in Utah against Young. At the same time the power of the Latter-Day Saints and Young’s autocracy were threatened by the growth of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which was formed in 1852 upon the announcement of the doctrine of polygamy, which declared that polygamy had been foisted upon the Church and that Brigham Young was an interloper, and which chose Joseph Smith III. (son of Joseph Smith, jun.; born in 1832) as its head in 1860; in 1863 and in 1869 representatives of the Reorganized Church preached in Salt Lake City.

As early as 1862 Congress had passed the Morrill Act (introduced by Justin S. Morrill) “to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the Territories,” but in 1867 the presiding officers of the Utah legislature, petitioning for the repeal of this act, declared that “the judiciary of this Territory has not, up to the present time, tried any case under said law.” Attempts to pass some extreme measures in 1866 and in 1869–1870 failed. In October 1871 a grand jury in Utah indicted Young and others for violating a Territorial statute against improper cohabitation; but in April 1872 the Supreme Court of the United States (Chilton v. Englebrech) practically declared the jury incompetent as it had been impanelled by a Federal (and not by a Territorial) marshal, and in October 1873 the same court (Snow v. The United States) ruled that the attorney-general appointed by the president in a territory could try no cases save those in which the Federal government was a party, thus putting the prosecution of polygamy cases into the hands of the locally elected attorney-general. But on the 23rd of June 1874 President Grant signed the Poland Act, “in relation to courts and judicial officers in the Territory of Utah,” which provided for prosecution by the United States attorney-general (not the locally elected official) in criminal cases in Federal courts in the Territory, for the impanelling of grand and petit jurors by the United States marshal, and for the challenge of any juror practising or believing in polygamy on a trial for adultery or polygamy, and otherwise corrected the defects in the Territorial law as pointed out by the Supreme Court, so that prosecutions for polygamy might no longer be a mere farce. But the law was little more than a dead letter: there were few prosecutions, and the only conviction was that of Young’s secretary, George Reynolds, whose case dragged on from 1874 to 1879. In 1873 Ann Eliza Young, called “Wife No. 19,” brought a suit for divorce against Brigham Young; the defendant was at various times imprisoned and fined for failure to pay alimony pendente lite; and in 1877 the judge decided that the marriage was void as polygamous.

Young died in Salt Lake City on the 29th of August 1877; he left an estate of more than $2,000,000, and was survived by about 25 wives and more than 40 children. The Church owes much to him, for he was an able leader. It has been said of him that he was “for daring a Cromwell, for intrigue a

Machiavelli, for executive force a Moses, and for utter absence of conscience a Bonaparte.” It must be borne in mind that to him, more than to anyone or anything else, was due the long struggle of the Church against the United States. His only doctrinal contribution to the Church was in 1852 when, in a sermon, he said that our Father could be none other than the first Man; that Adam came into the garden of Eden in a celestial body and with one of his wives; and that “He is our Father and our God, and the only God with whom we have to do.”

Young’s successor in the presidency—acting president until 1880—was John Taylor (1808–1887), an Englishman by birth, who was living at Toronto when P. P. Pratt converted him in 1836; he was a missionary in England in 1840; then went to Nauvoo and was wounded when Smith was killed; preached in France and Germany, and translated The Book of Mormon into French. His first counsellor, appointed in 1880, was George Q. Cannon, who was probably the real administrator. On the 22nd of March 1882 President Arthur approved the Edmunds Act, drafted by George F. Edmunds of Vermont, which disfranchised polygamists in the Territories, made ineligible for jury duty in prosecutions for bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation all who practised polygamy or believed in it, and made polygamy punishable by a maximum fine of $500 and imprisonment of not more than five years, and cohabitation with more than one woman punishable by a maximum fine of $300, imprisonment for not more than six months, or both. The act was opposed because it was ex post facto. Under the Edmunds Act and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of March 1887 about 1200 persons were convicted of polygamy or unlawful cohabitation in Utah, Idaho and Arizona. The law was so rigidly enforced that about 12,000 were disfranchised, and the president of the Church had to spend his last years in hiding, and many other prominent Mormons escaped “on the underground.” The Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 dissolved the Perpetual Emigration Company and the corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; and the Supreme Court in May 1890, on the ground that the Church was an organized rebellion, upheld the constitutionality of the confiscation of the Church property. On the 24th of September 1890 Wilford Woodruff (1807–1898), who had been chosen to succeed President Taylor in 1889, and who was himself a polygamist, issued a manifesto declaring “that my advice to Latter-Day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land”; and on the 6th of October the general conference of the Church approved Woodruff’s manifesto and accepted “his declaration concerning plural marriages as authoritative and binding.” This apparent rescindment of “revelation” was explained by Mormon scholars as Smith had explained the abandonment of the New Jerusalem in Missouri—the Saints were prevented from carrying out the commands contained in a revelation, but as they had tried to obey, they would not be punished for disobedience. On the 4th of January 1893, in response to a petition from the officials of the Church pledging the membership thereof to faithful obedience to the laws against polygamy, &c., President Harrison issued a general pardon to all liable to the penalties of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, on condition that they had not violated its provisions since the 1st of November 1890 and should not violate them in future. On the 4th of January 1896 Utah was admitted to the Union as a state, one of the conditions made by Congress being that polygamy should be prohibited by the state constitution, and that this prohibition be repealable only with the consent of the United States and of the people of the state; and article iii. of the constitution reads: “The following ordinance shall be irrevocable without the consent of the United States and the people of this state: Perfect