Beyond One Man and One Woman: Or, Reflections on Early American Polygamy

Of all the important studies of early American history in which one might engage—imperialism, relations between Native Americans and settlers, slavery and race, the American Revolution—polygamy would hardly seem worth considering.  Nineteenth-century American historians, of course, might feel differently, but historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America? Americans, professional historians or not, generally assume that polygamy only became a significant political issue in North America in the nineteenth century, with the controversies surrounding the Church of the Latter-Day Saints.  This is not the case; it was a series of fierce contests long before that.  Indeed, investigating polygamy in early America provides a novel avenue of approach to precisely those very fundamental issues of imperialism, relations between settlers and Native Americans, slavery and race, and the American Revolution.  It also provides a way to link the North American continent with other continents (all but Antarctica), oceans (including the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian), and islands (from the British isles to Polynesian ones).  Indeed, it is impossible to understand the history of early American polygamy, as ideal, horror, and practice, without comprehending the global history of the clash between monogamy and polygamy as organizing social, cultural, political, economic, and religious principles.  This paper, which comes from a larger project, offers an overview of these issues, and an exploration of some telling examples.  In so doing, it seeks to prompt a re-consideration of ideas about the relationship between marriage and imperial power.  It also hopes to provoke a lively discussion of why forms of marriage beyond one man and one woman can seem so threatening to social and political orders, then and now.