Polygamy Quotes
Luther’s logic was that polygamy was sanctioned in the Old Testament and never specifically forbidden in the New Testament. This fact totally puzzled the American Mormons when the Protestants railed against the immorality of their plural marriages.
This quote is from notes by James Beck, October 8, 1861 on which he later enscribed "I do not vouch for the correctness of this by any means as my experience is that the memory of man is treacherous. – JA Beck”
Young had been monogamous for 18 years when Church founder and leader Joseph Smith ordered him to take more wives.
Jackson's Secretary of War, John Henry Eaton, 1790-1856, had been having an affair with a married woman with a proclivity toward promiscuity. Her husband committed suicide and Eaton married her causing one of the great scandals of American history. It split Andrew Jackson's cabinet and ended with Jackson, who supported Eaton, replacing the entire cabinet except the Postmaster General. Vice President John C. Calhoun's chances for the Presidency died as he and Jackson broke over this scandal.
Notes was the founder of the Utopian Community of Oneida, New York. It was based on a concept of work distribution with an almost communal style of raising children and everyday living. In such a circumstance, the role of the married couple was far more complex that in the typical single family structure which permeated society at the time for the middle and upper classes while the poor had almost no structure that could be maintained. Monogamy rules were discouraged and some critics described the situation as free love. Notes, politically wisely, preferred the term "complex marriage" which did not have all the pejorative baggage that "free love" did. Oneida evolved to a more conventional social structure over time, and the community members developed skills like silver smithing that allowed them to be quite successful economically, and "Oneide Silver" was prized into the 21st century.
