From The City of the Saints:
And Across the Rocky Mountains to California
By Richard F. Burton
New York: Harper & Brothers, 1862

1862 ILLUSTRATION
1862 ILLUSTRATION
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From Chapter X

It will, I suppose, be necessary to supply a popular view of the "peculiar institution," at once the bane and blessing of Mormonism,--plurality. I approach the subject with a feeling of despair, so conflicting are opinions concerning it, and so difficult is it to naturalize in Europe the customs of Asia, Africa, and America, or to reconcile the habits of the 19th century A.D. with those of 1900 B.C. A return to the patriarchal ages, we have seen, has its disadvantages.

There is a prevailing idea, especially in England and even the educated are laboring under it, that the Mormons are Communists or Socialists of Plato's, Cicero's, Mr. Owen's, and M. Cabet's school; that wives are in public, and that a woman can have as many husbands as the husband can have wives--in fact, to speak colloquially, that they "all pig together." The contrary is notably the case. The man who, like Messrs. Hamilton and Howard Egan, murders, in cold blood, his wife's lover, is invariably acquitted, the jury declaring that civil damages mark the rottenness of other governments, and that "the principle, the only one that beats and throbs through the heart of the entire inhabitants (!) of this Territory, is simply this: The man who seduces his neighbor's wife must die, and her nearest relation must kill him." Men, like Dr. Vaughan and Mr. Monroe, slain for the mortal sin, perish for their salvation; the Prophet, were they to lay their lives at his feet, would, because unable to hang or behead them, counsel them to seek certain death in a righteous cause as an expiatory sacrifice,* which may save their souls alive. Their two mortal sins are: 1. Adultery; 2. Shedding of innocent blood.

This severity of punishing an offense which modern and civilized society looks upon rather in the light of a sin than of a crime, is clearly based upon the Mosaic code. It is also, lex loci, the "common mountain law," a "religious and social custom," and a point of personal honor. Another idea underlies it: the Mormons hold, like the Hebrews of old, "children of shame" in extreme dishonor. They quote the command of God, Deuteronomy (xxiii., 2), "a mamzer shall not enter into the Church of the Lord til the tenth generation," and ask when the order was repealed. They would expel all impurity from the Camp of Zion, and they adopt every method of preventing what they consider a trememdous evil, viz., the violation of God's temple in their own bodies.

[One paragraph omitted.]

The first wife, as among polygamists generally, is the wife, and assumes the husband's name and title. Her "plurality"-partners are called sisters--such as Sister Anne or Sister Blanche--and are the aunts of her children. The first wife is married for time, the other are sealed for eternity. Hence, according to the Mormons, arose the Gentile calumny concerning spiritual wifedom, which they distinctly deny. Girls rarely remain single past sixteen--in England the average marrying age is thirty--and they would be the pity of the community if they were doomed to a waste of youth so unnatural.

[Two paragraphs omitted.]

The "chaste and plural marriage," being once legalized, finds a multitude of supporters. The anti-Mormons declare that it is at once fornication and adultery--a sin which absorbs all others. The Mormons point triumphantly to the austere morals of their community, their superior freedom from maladive influences, and the absence of that uncleanness and licentiousness which distinguish the cities of the civilized world. They boast that, if it be an evil, they have at least chosen the lesser evil; that they practice openly as a virtue what others do secretly as a sin--how full is society of these latent Mormons!--that their plurality has abolished the necessity of concubinage, cryptogamy, contubernium, celibacy, mariages du treizième arrondissement, with their terrible consequences, infanticide, and so forth; that they have removed their ways from those "whose end is bitter as wormwood, and sharp as a two-edged sword." Like its sister institution Slavery, the birth and growth of a similar age, Polygamy acquires vim by abuse and detraction: the more turpitude is heaped upon it, the brighter and more glorious it appears to its votaries.

There are rules and regulations of Mormonism--I can not say whether they date before or after the heavenly command to pluralize--which disprove the popular statement that such marriages are made to gratify licentiousness, and which render polygamy a positive necessity. All sensuality in the married state is strictly forbidden beyond the requisite for insuring progeny--the practice, in fact, of Adam and Abraham. During the gestation and nursing of children, the strictest continence on the part of the mother is required--rather for a hygienic than for a religious reason. The same custom is practiced in part by the Jews, and in whole by some of the noblest tribes of savages: the splendid physical development of the Kaffir race in South Africa is attributed by some authors to rule of continence like that of the Mormons, and to a lactation prolonged for two years. The anomaly of such a practice in the midst of civilization is worthy of a place in De Balzac's great repertory of morbid anatomy: it is only to be equaled by the exceptional nature of the Mormon's position, his past fate and his future prospects. Spartan-like, the Faith wants a race of warriors, and it adopts the best means to obtain them.

[One paragraph omitted.]

To the unprejudiced traveler it appears that polygamy is the rule where population is required, and where the great social evil has not had time to develop itself. In Paris or London the institution would, like slavery, die a natural death; in Arabia and in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains it maintains a strong hold upon the affections of mankind. Monogamy is best fitted for the large, wealthy, and flourishing communities in which man is rarely the happier because his quiver is full of children, and where the Hetæra becomes the succedaneum of the "plurality-wife." Polyandry has been practiced principally by priestly and barbarous tribes, who fear most for the increase of their numbers, which would end by driving them to honest industry. It reappears in a remarkable manner in the highest state of social civilization, where excessive expenditure is an obstacle to freehold property, and the practice is probably on the increase.

The other motive for polygamy in Utah is economy. Servants are rare and costly; it is cheaper and more comfortable to marry them. Many converts are attracted by the prospect of becoming wives, especially from places where, like Clifton, there are sixty-four females to thirty-six males. The old maid is, as she ought to be, an unknown entity. Life in the wilds of Western America is a course of severe toil: a single woman can not perform the manifold duties of housekeeping, cooking, scrubbing, washing, darning, child-bearing, and nursing a family. A division of labor is necessary, and she finds it by acquiring a sisterhood. Throughout the States, whenever a woman is seen at manual or outdoor work, one is certain that she is Irish, German, or Scandinavian. The delicacy and fragility of the Anglo-American female nature is at once the cause and the effect of this exemption from toil.

[One paragraph omitted.]

It will be asked, what view does the softer sex take of polygamy? A few, mostly from the Old Country, lament that Mr. Joseph Smith ever asked of the Creator that question which was answered in the affirmative. A very few, like the Curia Electa, Emma, the first wife of Mr. Joseph Smith--who said of her, by-the-by, that she could not be contented in heaven without rule--apostatize, and become Mrs. Bridemann. The many are, as might be expected of the easily-moulded weaker vessel, which proves its inferior position by the delicate flattery of imitation, more in favor of polygyny than the stronger.



From Chapter XI: Last Days at Great Salt Lake City

I NOW terminate my observations upon the subject of Mormonism. It will be remarked that the opinions of others--not my own-- have been recorded as carefully as my means of study have permitted, and that facts, not theories, have been the object of this dissertation.

It will, I think, be abundantly evident that Utah Territory has been successful in its colonization. Every where, indeed, in the New World, the stranger wonders that a poor man should tarry in Europe, or that a rich man should remain in America; nothing but the strongest chains of habit and vis intertioe can reconcile both to their miserable lots. I can not help thinking that, morally and spiritually, as well as physically, the protégés of the Perpetual Emigration Fund gain by being transferred to the Far West. Mormonism is emphatically the faith of the poor, and those acquainted with the wretched condition of the English mechanic, collier, and agricultural laborer--it is calculated that a million of them exist on £25 per annum--who, after a life of ignoble drudgery, of toiling through the year from morning till night, are ever threatened with the work-house, must be of the same opinion. Physically speaking, there is no comparison between the conditions of the Saints and the class from which they are mostly taken. In point of mere morality, the Mormon community is perhaps purer than any other of equal numbers. I have no wish to commend their spiritual, or, rather, their materialistic vagaries--a materialism so leveling in its unauthorized deductions that even the materialist must reject it; but with the mind as with the body, bad food is better than none. When wealth shall be less unequally distributed in England, thus doing away with the contrast of excessive splendor and utter destitution, and when Home Missions shall have done their duty in educating and evangelizing the unhappy pariahs of town and country, the sons of the land which boasts herself to be the foremost among the nations will blush no more to hear that the Mormons or Latter-Day Saints are mostly English.


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