The Morrill Act criminalized bigamy in U.S. territories and restricted religious institutions' property holdings, a direct strike at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' practice of plural marriage in Utah. Though largely unenforced during the Civil War, it set the stage for escalating federal pressure that eventually forced the Mormon church to officially abandon polygamy in 1890.
Congress passed the act with little debate, distracted by the Civil War, but its symbolic weight was immense: for the first time, the federal government explicitly outlawed a religiously sanctioned marital practice. Brigham Young and Utah's territorial legislature largely ignored the law, and federal prosecutors struggled to secure convictions given the difficulty of proving marriages that church records didn't formally register as legal unions.
Enforcement intensified only after the Civil War ended, culminating in the harsher Edmunds Act of 1882 and Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, which disincorporated the church and seized its assets. Facing financial ruin, church president Wilford Woodruff issued the 1890 Manifesto disavowing new plural marriages, clearing the path for Utah statehood in 1896. The 1862 law thus began a thirty-year standoff between American pluralism and a distinctly American religious practice.
Key people: Abraham Lincoln, Brigham Young