In the Whirlpool: The Pre-Manifesto Letters to President Wilford Woodruff to the William Atkin Family, 1885-1890

Political and religious turmoil in the late 1800s plagued the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its leaders. As Utah statehood loomed, Congress aggressively moved against Mormons who engaged in polygamy. One of those who went into hiding in 1879 was Wilford Woodruff, who became church president in 1887. This never-before-published collection of Woodruff's letters to the Atkins, edited by Reid L. Neilson, reveals the church leader's political and spiritual conflicts in the five years leading up to his 1890 Manifesto, which officially disallowed polygamy.