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Show VI1 Illinois. The ravaged church licked its wounds across the Great Plains to Utah where polygamy was practiced openly, touted as a plan for man's deification and celestial glory. Second Church President Brigham Young promoted polygamy with fervor, taking twenty-seven wives for himself and declaring to his brethren, in a rather infelicitous choice of words, "we must gird up our loins and keep this Principle." As the U.S. government exerted increasing pressure to eradicate polygamy from Utah Territory (it was said, along with slavery, to be one of the "twin relics of barbarism") the Mormon bloc of votes grew, including the franchise of women, who usually voted as their husbands dictated. At last the Edmunds-Tucker Act (and others) stripped Mormon polygamists of franchise, their lands and possessions, and personal freedom when tried, and imprisoned But third Church President John Taylor warned the Church to stand its ground, predicting that "one backward step...and the time will come when the greatest enemy of the Principle is the Church itself." After Taylor's death, however, the Church capitulated, signing the Manifesto, and releasing the congregation from an unpopular doctrine that caused its believers more grief and harassment than anything else. Grandfather, as the oldest of his father's first family, turned his prodigious energies to making a secular success of his life. First he farmed, then he taught school, then he |