The Sins of the Great-Grandfather

Among the weighty issues being debated in the press are whether Barack Obama is black enough to be president, and whether Mitt Romney's great-grandfather is fit to be the great-grandfather of a president.

Romney's great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, married his fifth wife in 1897. That was more than six years after Mormon leaders banned polygamy and more than three decades after a federal law barred the practice.

Romney's great-grandmother, Hannah Hood Hill, was the daughter of polygamists. She wrote vividly in her autobiography about how she "used to walk the floor and shed tears of sorrow" over her own husband's multiple marriages. [Link]

Mistress to Mrs. in One Year

I found an interesting selection at Google Books called The Geography of Marriage: Or, Legal Perplexities of Wedlock in the United States, published in 1889. The author notes inconsistencies in the marriage laws of various states, and expounds upon the dangers of miscegenation, of polygamy, and of living in Arizona.

A mistress or concubine up to the present time has never been accorded the rights and privileges of a wife, and it has come to be a maxim that mere concubinage can never drift into matrimony, nor become wedlock by lapse of time. This rule, however, has been reversed in Arizona, by a law passed February 28, 1887, whereby it is declared that parties who have lived together as husband and wife and continued to do so for a year, shall be considered as having been legally married; and if either die within the year the same result follows, and the children are declared legitimate. Within the geographical limits of Arizona, therefore, if nowhere else on the globe, it is possible to become husband and wife without getting married at all. [Link]

According to Wikipedia, Arizona banned common-law marriages in 1913, shortly after becoming a state.

Governor Lags Behind His Ancestors

The Salt Lake Tribune has turned up plenty of polygamists in Mitt Romney's family history, but the Massachusetts governor insists that marriage is between a man and a woman—not between a man and seventeen women.

Romney's great-great grandfather on his paternal grandmother's side is a famous Mormon from the settling of the western realm of Deseret (part of which later became Utah), where followers fled in the 1800s to escape anti-Mormon persecution fueled, in part, by opposition to polygamy.

Parley P. Pratt was one of the influential LDS Church leaders during the early years. He married 12 times, though his first wife died before he took a second. A former husband of one of his plural wives eventually killed Pratt. [Link]

... thus proving that polygamy can be fatal.