The principal flash point was the Mormon practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, as it was also known. Of all the facets of the history of his faith, this is the one Mitt Romney, in his speeches and writings, has said the least about—and he has reason. It is a practice three generations behind him in his own family and long illegal in the United States. He is a devoted family man and finds the whole idea unspeakable and repugnant. “They were trying to build a generation out there in the desert, and so he [Miles P. Romney] took additional wives as he was told to do. And I must admit I can’t imagine anything more awful than polygamy,” Romney has said.
It was a firm repudiation, but again, as in the description of the “faith of his fathers” in his campaign speech, remarkably colorless. Understanding where Mitt Romney fits into the long line of his ancestors requires going deeper than that. For Miles P. Romney’s story is interlaced, to an astonishing degree, with the history of polygamy in the church and in the church’s transition away from it. He was a trusted leader who lived through, and would barely survive, this bloody cataclysm in the early Mormon way.
Miles had grown into one of the fiercest defenders of his faith, as well as one of the most engaging members of the Romney family. One family member described him as “emotionally high strung” and prone to issuing “scathing denunciations” against those who disagreed with him. Blustery and imposing, Miles bore the family trademark of a long face and high forehead, and he would be remembered for working off his energy by taking to the ballroom floor and acting in theatrical productions, with a preference for playing Hamlet.
When Miles turned eighteen, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, asked to see him. Young had succeeded Joseph Smith as president of the church, and he was known as the Mormon Moses for having led the exodus of his followers from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City.
Are you married? Young asked Miles.
No, Miles replied.
You must marry as soon as possible, Young said.
Miles was an obedient believer and, as it happened, in love. An “attractive Scotch lass” named Hannah Hood Hill had caught Miles’s eye. She was a nineteen-year-old born near Toronto, Canada, who had arrived as a one-year-old in Nauvoo around the time Miles was born there. In contrast to Miles’s fiery temperament, Hannah was hard to ruffle, a calm yet firm influence.
So it was that on May 10, 1862, at Salt Lake City’s Endowment House, where Mormon rituals were conducted, Miles P. Romney married Hannah. She would bear him ten children and one day be known as the great-grandmother of Mitt Romney. The couple had a month together before the church sent them on their separate ways. Hannah was pregnant when she received the news. Young had ordered that Miles leave for a missionary trip to England, which would keep him apart from his new wife for three years. As Hannah later recalled it, “We had no display at our marriage, nor a very long honeymoon, but our love was for each other and [we] were happy in each other’s society.” When they separated, she felt as though her “only friend” had left her. She supported herself during Miles’s absence by washing “all day from sunup to sundown for a dollar.”
Two months after the marriage, on July 8, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act, which was intended to prohibit polygamy in Utah and the other territories where Mormons had settled. But this was one year into the Civil War, and Lincoln’s true priority was to ensure that Mormons stayed out of that conflict. The president delivered a message via a Mormon courier: “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone.” The antibigamy act was rarely enforced. Miles, meanwhile, was committed to his mission in England to bring converts to the United States, laying out his defense of his religion in a fiery article titled “Persecution.”
“Many, now, wonder why it is that we are so despised,” Romney wrote. “Many likewise, will argue . . . that if we had the Truth we would not be so despised by the great majority of mankind.” But Romney stood by his faith, writing that “from the earliest ages of the history of man, Truth and those who strictly adhere to its principles have been unpopular.”
Romney returned to Utah in October 1865, meeting his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Isabella, for the first time, and becoming reacquainted with his wife. He was an excellent provider in many ways, an expert in preaching his faith, and a skilled carpenter, but he was not the most practical pioneer. One of his sons later wrote that Miles “never milked a cow, cut a stick of wood, or cut a chicken’s head off.” By contrast, it was Hannah who was “practical, resourceful,” and more accomplished at adapting to pioneer life. Miles and Hannah began life together with few possessions, most notably a small stove, a bed, three chairs, and a table. Miles eventually bought some land, and the Romneys moved into a two-room wooden house. Hannah became pregnant again, and a second daughter was born. “We were happy,” Hannah recalled years later. “We had two sweet little girls to bless our home.”
It was then, in 1867, that Miles had another fateful meeting with Brigham Young. “Brother Miles, I want you to take another wife,” Young said. Miles faced the choice of obeying U.S. law or the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He decided to commit himself to polygamy. A family biography put it this way: “Nothing short of a firm belief in the divine origin of the Revelation of plural marriage could have induced Miles P. Romney to take a second wife.” He followed Young’s order.
Hannah was distraught, and she would tell of her despair in a memoir written privately for her family when she was eighty years old. The memoir, later published in an obscure collection of pioneer tales, provides one of the most affecting and revealing accounts of the emotional toll that polygamy took on Mormon women. “I felt that was more than I could endure, to have him divide his time and affections,” Hannah wrote. “I used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow. . . . If anything will make a woman’s heart ache, it is for her husband to take another wife, but I put my trust in my Heavenly Father and prayed and pled with him to give me strength to bear this trial.” Then Hannah performed her duty: she prepared a room for her husband’s new wife. The practice would become familiar as her husband became among the most dedicated to the practice of taking “plural wives.” Despite her despair, Hannah wrote, “I was able to live in the principle of polygamy and give my husband many wives.”
So three months after Hannah gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, Miles began a new branch of his family. He married his second wife, Caroline Lambourne, a “very beautiful” twenty-year-old who had emigrated from Scotland. Brigham Young then gave Romney and his two wives a new mission: sell your home and move to the southern Utah town of St. George. Miles was chosen for a set of skills that would be known as Romney trademarks: he was unquestionably loyal to the faith and its leaders; he was a skilled carpenter; and he had experience building a community from the ground up. He had become a leader himself. The new settlement, about three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, was a mostly treeless expanse in a vast desert, surrounded by red-toned ridges in a region where temperatures often reached above 100 degrees in the summer.
Yet Young envisioned a beauteous future. He had prophesied that “There will yet be built between these volcanic ridges, a city, with spires and towers and steeples, with homes containing many inhabitants.” The Romneys sold their Salt Lake City home at a loss and moved to St. George, where Miles, his daughters, and his two wives lived “in a little shanty, a small board room, and a wagon box,” Hannah wrote. Miles was joined in St. George by his father, who became the architect and builder of the steepled red-brick Mormon tabernacle there. The elder Romney had retained the trade that he learned in England, and his work included building two elaborate wooden spiral staircases. Later, father and son helped construct St. George’s grand white Mormon temple, larger than the tabernacle and used for the most sacred rites. The Romneys were also hired by Young to help build his winter home in St. George. Father and son took on the task with zeal, constructing one of the era’s most lavish residences
in Utah, an adobe and sandstone dwelling with high-ceilinged rooms and an elaborate porch painted red and green.
But though Miles prospered as a builder, he had increasing trouble handling two wives. Hannah wrote that Caroline “was very jealous of me. She wanted all my husband’s attention. When she couldn’t get it there was always a fuss in the house. [Miles], being a just man, didn’t give way to her tantrums.” Miles and Caroline, meanwhile, had two children, whom Hannah agreed to care for. But Caroline was despondent due to the “trials met with in plural marriage” and the hardship of living in remote St. George, one of Miles’s sons later wrote. She asked Brigham Young for permission to return to her parents in Salt Lake. Young agreed, and Miles and Caroline eventually divorced. She was the only one of Miles’s wives who would leave him.
As Miles rose in the church’s hierarchy, he was given a new responsibility: to help defeat a new congressional effort to enforce antipolygamy laws. Many Mormons feared that the legislation would disenfranchise them. The measure had passed the House of Representatives and was under consideration by the Senate. Romney and four other Mormon leaders took responsibility for trying to defeat the measure. They signed a letter in 1870 stating that “the Anti-polygamy bill is an act of . . . ostracism, never before heard of in a republican government and in its parallel hardly to be found in the most absolute despotisms, disfranchising and criminating, as it does, 200,000 free and loyal citizens, because of a particular tenet in their religious faith.” The lobbying paid off, and the bill died in the Senate
For a brief time, with Caroline having left, Miles and Hannah were once again in a single-wife marriage. It was then, in 1871, that Hannah gave birth to Gaskell, the grandfather of Mitt Romney. “He was a fine specimen of a child, always healthy and happy,” Hannah wrote.
Two years after Gaskell’s birth, Miles met a woman described as the “prettiest girl in St. George,” the fair-skinned Catharine Cottam, who had flowing hair and a serene smile. Catharine’s father was well known for building furniture, including the chairs in Brigham Young’s home. Catharine wrote a letter at the time that provides a revealing glimpse of Miles. Telling her parents how much she loved him, she assured them that he had “reformed” considerably and “he firmly believes that with my love and influence and assistance, he will become a better man.” A family historian who is a descendant of Catharine and Miles wrote that this referred to Miles’s “weakness for wine.” In any case, the assurances of self-improvement seemed to take hold, and Miles married Catharine in Salt Lake City on September 15, 1873.
For the second time, Hannah steeled herself to share her husband, though, seven months pregnant, she did not attend the wedding. Instead, she prepared a room for Catharine, whom she called “a girl of good principles and a good Latter-day Saint.” She had the house plastered, painted, and papered and sewed rags into a carpet. She felt she had to “do my duty” even “if my heart did ache.” All the while, Hannah worried that this new wife would be as difficult as the departed Caroline. But Catharine was different. She was “considerate of my feelings and good to the children,” and the two wives got along well for the rest of their lives. Yet it was still difficult to accept another wife in the house. When Miles thanked Hannah for welcoming Catharine into their home, it only partly took away her despair. “Many nights I would cry myself to sleep,” she wrote.
For a brief time, Miles settled into a routine, living with his wives, Hannah and Catharine. He continued working with his father on church-related construction projects. Then tragedy struck anew. It was at 5:30 a.m., on May 3, 1877, that the seventy-year-old Romney, working on a high window of the Tabernacle of St. George, plummeted to the ground. Thirty-six years after leaving England, the patriarch of the Romney family was dead. The Deseret News paid tribute to him as “one of the noblest works of God, an honest man.” Now it was left to his namesake, Miles P., to carry on as a family leader.
Four months later, Miles decided it was time to take another wife, choosing Annie Maria Woodbury, a schoolteacher. He now lived with three wives and thought they would all remain for years in St. George, which had grown into a city of about 1,800 people. Then the church issued a new call. Church leaders in Salt Lake City had devised a plan to plant Mormon communities in an arc throughout the West. Miles was told in 1881 to uproot his family and help settle the small town of St. Johns, Arizona, where an initial wave of Mormon settlers was having difficulty getting along with local Mexicans, Indians, and non-Mormon migrants. The Romneys were required to leave their home and head some four hundred miles across the wilderness to a sparsely settled territory. Hannah laid down one condition for the trip: she would go only if they could take their prized organ, which the Romney children were learning to play. “I said I would take it if I had to walk,” Hannah wrote, “so we took it.”
The Romneys journeyed southeast, taking their wagon trains on a harrowing trail that skirted the northern rim of the Grand Canyon, a barrier that walled off their passage for two hundred miles until an opening appeared at a ferry landing in Glen Canyon. After traversing mountains and riding beneath the Vermilion Cliffs, the Romneys paid the ferry tender $2 per wagon to cross the Colorado River. After the horses and wagons were ferried across the river, the Romneys stood beneath a series of red-rock, triangular-shaped cliffs. Just up the river, the cliffs gave way to a rocky formation known as Lee’s Backbone, which resembled a skyward ramp toward the looming plateau. “Here you can see the river hundreds of feet below you winding its way between perpendicular banks of solid rock without a tree to be seen and devoid of vegetation,” Catharine wrote.
Finally, after a journey of about four hundred miles, the Romneys arrived in St. Johns, Arizona, a Wild West amalgamation of gun-toting immigrant farmers, Native Americans, and Mexicans, many of whom despised the Mormons. There were complaints not only against the newcomers’ religious practices but also about whether they had paid for the title to their land. The Romney family moved into a small wooden house, tents, and a wagon and survived on bread, beans, and gravy. “With the noise and confusion I used to feel as if I would go crazy, but still I kept my senses,” Hannah wrote. She became pregnant with twins but miscarried them. With the arrival of winter, the mountains closed them in. It was, Hannah wrote, a “hard, cold country.”
The Romneys eventually found more comfortable lodging, moving into a two-story farmhouse with a steeply pitched roof and center stairway. But they were constantly harassed. A new antipolygamy law, much tougher than the old one, which had rarely been acted upon, was enacted in 1882, and federal marshals were under orders to enforce it. The marshals swept through areas with heavy Mormon populations, and the Romney family soon became a target. A local newspaper, the Apache Chief, urged in 1884 that townspeople use “the shotgun and rope” to get rid of Mormon settlers. During that time, Miles worked closely with the top Mormon official in the area, Bishop David Udall. “Hang a few of their polygamist leaders such as . . . Udall [and] Romney . . . and a stop will be put to it,” the newspaper said. The newspaper’s editor, George A. McCarter, viciously attacked Romney as “a mass of putrid pus and rotten goose pimples; a skunk, with the face of a baboon, the character of a louse, the breath of a buzzard and the record of a perjurer and common drunkard.” This mass of accusations reeks of the kind of bar stool name-calling that was common in the Wild West. Still, although Miles had promised seven years earlier to reform his taste for wine, it is possible he had not succeeded.
Romney defended the Mormons in a newspaper he edited called the Orion Era, which had about five hundred subscribers. But that only further incensed the townspeople, who vented their “hate upon Romney,” according to a Udall family history. The tension rose as local authorities sought to jail Romney on charges of polygamy. The threat was real. Around that time, Miles’s older brother George, who had been a member of the Salt Lake City Council, was arrested under the antipolygamy law and jailed for six months. Other Mormon leaders were arrested and sent to confinement in a land that som
e in the church considered the “American Siberia”: Detroit, Michigan.
In an effort to avoid conviction on polygamy charges, Romney sent two of his three wives, Catharine and Annie, into hiding. At first they hid in cornfields during the day and stayed with some neighbors at night, and later they hid in the mountains of New Mexico. As a result, Romney evaded the charges of polygamy “due to lack of evidence,” his son Thomas later wrote. Had Miles been convicted, he would have been sent to the jail for polygamists in Detroit and forbidden “against speaking above a whisper at any time during the term of imprisonment.”
But authorities brought new charges, alleging that Romney had lied about having title to his land. One night, a marshal arrived at Miles’s home after midnight, demanding his surrender. “The marshal had a gun in one hand and handcuffs in the other,” Hannah wrote. “I told him Mr. Romney was not at home. He said he had better give himself up to save the country expense and himself more trouble.” Romney had already fled on a wagon, hiding under a quilt in case marshals stopped the entourage. As Miles searched for a new safe haven, church leaders proposed a solution. They told him to go to Mexico to build a Mormon colony in which polygamy would be allowed to flourish. Miles agreed to the plan. With marshals in pursuit, Miles decided it was safest to go with only one of his wives, Annie, “disguising himself so completely that even members of his own family did not recognize him.” He left behind Hannah and Catharine and their children, hoping they would reunite in the coming months.
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