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Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff. Edited by Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009. xiv + 280 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff, edited by Lu Ann Faylor Snyder and Phillip A. Snyder, illuminates a unique moment of crisis for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) through the personal writings of three latenineteenth- century church members. Their correspondence spans the years of the church's transition out of the official practice of plurality (plural marriage), which resulted in an ungraceful and complicated shift that is well demonstrated by these letters and the accompanying autobiographical sketch. The original documents published in this volume - eighty-five letters and Avery Woodruff's autobiographical recollections - are housed in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. They are contextualized here with a helpful introduction that frames the lives of the three Woodruffs in historical context.
During the fifty years following Joseph Smith's introduction of the doctrine of a plurality of wives to a select group of his followers, the practice became increasingly central to the Mormon concept of heaven and was tied to an individual's personal salvation. Despite the doctrinal importance of the concept, decades of conflict with the federal government and a series of increasingly punitive bills outlawing the practice proved to be fatal obstacles to its unhindered continuance. In 1890, LDS Church president Wilford Woodruff issued his first Manifesto, which ended the official sanction of plural marriage. Yet the practice continued, in part because of varied interpretations of the language of the Manifesto itself. Historian B. Carmon Hardy, for example, lists 262 postManifesto marriages, numbers that include the relationship of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff (183).
These letters were written during a particularly difficult five-year period in the church's history, ending the year of the Second Manifesto of 1904, when the church began to excommunicate polygamists. These are also years spanning of the marriage of Owen Woodruff and Helen May Winters, and, four years later, of Owen Woodruff and Eliza Avery Clark, who joined the family as Owen's plural wife.1 Depicting the same moment in...