The number of converts grew, for Mormonism offered not just security, comfort, and hierarchy, it provided ritual: washing, anointing, even the wearing of underwear were all prescribed. And as a self-sustaining collective, it endowed each person with the purpose of a saint. “In temporal things you shall be equal,” Smith had said. Mormons believed their long pilgrimages from one place to another to be a westward exodus, divinely ordained. Their hardships were a test; their successes, a blessing. Persecution united them in their faith and toughened it.
As a political force, the Mormons were greatly resented and, they believed, further persecuted since their numbers had grown too large for non-Mormons to tolerate. Joseph Smith was accused of being an accessory before the fact in an attempted assassination of Governor Boggs. When he was extradited to Missouri, though, the judge declared the writ of extradition invalid. More ominous, though, was the schism within the community, which played to the general non-Mormon mistrust of their religion and growing political clout. Many Latter-day Saints—Christians for whom bigamy was taboo—were balking at the idea of plural or celestial marriage, which Smith evidently preached, having been divinely instructed to do so. One of Smith’s counselors, John Cook Bennett, himself excommunicated for adultery, then wrote an exposé of Smith (whom he called the Holy Joe), which included salacious information about the Mormon system of secret wives.
By 1844 there was more trouble, especially after Smith declared himself a presidential candidate and sent Mormon elders to campaign for him. When he selected a secret Council of Fifty to help with his presidential bid—and which crowned him king of the Kingdom of God—a group of dissenting Mormons, tired of Smith’s grandiosity and what they considered hypocrisy, published a newspaper, the Nauvoo Expositor, that threatened to expose polygamy in the community. (Until then, though it had been rumored, polygamy had been a secret shared only by the church hierarchy.) Smith swiftly ordered the newspaper office closed, and after one of his henchmen kicked down its door and torched the place, the governor of Illinois interceded. Smith and his brother surrendered to the authorities. Charged with inciting a riot, they were jailed in Carthage, Illinois. They were awaiting trial when on June 27, 1844, a mob of men, their faces blackened with gunpowder, entered the jail and murdered the two of them.
Brigham Young, Smith’s special assistant, assumed the leadership of the Mormons. Born in 1801 in Vermont, Young had worked as a carpenter for a while in the burned-over area of New York after his mother’s death, when he was fourteen. (He had helped construct the house in Auburn that William Seward later occupied.) Married in 1824, he was a religious seeker and Methodist who first read the Book of Mormon at the age of twenty-nine. Baptized two years later, the year his first wife died, the young convert set out to meet Joseph Smith. Smith liked him, and he sent Young to preach in the northeast though Young also worked on the erection of the Mormon temple in Kirtland. Subsequently dispatched to England, Young published an edition of the Book of Mormon there and converted so many of the British that he set up a shipping agency to transport thousands of them to America.
With his talent for missionary work and empire-building, Young soon emerged as the apostle best suited to lead the Mormons out of Illinois after the death of Joseph Smith. He resettled 16,000 Mormons in Iowa and Nebraska, and once the Illinois legislature revoked the Nauvoo charter in 1845, Young led the Mormon migration to the new state of Deseret in the Great Salt Lake Valley. By then the international ministry had almost 35,000 members.
At Salt Lake City, or the City of Zion in the Promised Valley, Young oversaw the seeding and planting of crops, the building of homes, the enlargement of farms, the manufacture of plows and wagons, the local processing of timber and hides, the establishment of regional banks and education centers, and the creation of probate courts vested with powers not authorized by Congress. Each family received land, and most settlements possessed livestock herds. Each settlement had a general store. Families paid tithes to the church. Young converts mined iron, lead, and coal for the church. Their settlements flourishing and expanding westward (especially after gold was discovered in California), their businesses and enterprises lucrative, and their church membership still increasing, the Mormons had created a theocratic state within a territory. The Southern journal DeBow’s Review carped that “they desire a kingly government in order to make their patriarchal institutions more harmonious.”
After the creation of the Utah Territory, which extended from the Colorado Rockies to the Sierra Nevada, via the Compromise of 1850, President Millard Fillmore named Brigham Young the superintendent of Indian affairs and governor. But the federal government grew suspicious of what amounted to a shadow country aping America’s dominant values: westward expansion, religious freedom, moneymaking. Plus, Mormons also believed in obedience to the group; individualism was vanity, except in the case of the prophets, who included Smith and, now, Brigham Young. Mormons were a closed society, disciplined, organized, cohesive, colonizing. And there was that matter of polygamy, which was anathema to proper American culture. The Church of Latter-day Saints was a “Religion of Sensuality,” George Templeton Strong scoffed.
Democrats had always treated the Mormons with benign neglect—though sometimes with a degree of support (presumably Stephen Douglas had helped the Mormons win the liberal Illinois charter). And Mormons were likewise hospitable to Democrats such as Douglas. With his doctrine of popular sovereignty, Douglas in the White House would likely let them alone or even go so far as to let the Mormons enter the Union; Young had been lobbying the federal government in vain to admit Deseret as a state. (Much larger than the Utah Territory, Deseret, which meant “honeybee” to the Mormons, would include the Great Basin and stretch out to the Pacific coast.) But this was an opportunity for Republicans, who could charge that popular sovereignty effectively sanctioned moral malfeasance. The Republican presidential candidate, John Frémont, had pledged in 1856 to wipe out “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.”
The press had obliged the Republican campaign by unleashing a series of anti-Mormon reports from disgruntled federal officials who had fled the territory; these were sensational stories about bloody baptisms, about murder, prostitution, and persecution, about the shooting of elders and the selling of young girls. What shall we do with the Mormons?, nervously asked The New York Times in the spring of 1857. “At whatever cost, the United States must declare and vindicate its supremacy,” declared Harper’s Weekly. Even Stephen Douglas had to turn against the Mormons, who, he said, were forming alliances with Indian tribes to rob and murder U.S. citizens. Plus, the Church of Latter-day Saints was a “loathsome, disgusting ulcer,” Douglas said, invoking a higher law—that of monogamy.
Ironically, the Mormons had forced Douglas’s hand, for their claim to popular sovereignty and self-government placed the Little Giant in an untenable position. How could he support a group that voted for polygamy even if, by his reasoning, the group could vote as it wished? His solution was to rescind the Utah territorial charter “upon the ground,” he said, “that it is run by outlaws perpetrating treason.” Of course, before he would place Utah under the jurisdiction of the federal government, Douglas wanted the allegations against the Mormons to be proved, even though, as The New York Times noted, he “seemed to believe all of them to be true.”
An Illinois Republican, Abraham Lincoln, was happy to take this opportunity to refute Douglas. “Why deprive the Mormons of the sacred right of ‘squatter sovereignty’?” he jeered. “This thing of squatter sovereignty was never anything but a humbug, generated in the marshes and pools of South Carolina, and used as a pretext to run and pour slaves out of the land as hot lava is belched out from the crater of the fire mountain. It stinks of fraud.”
The issue, then, was not Mormonism. It was still slavery.
Slavery: to President James Buchanan the Mormons of Utah could serve as a convenient distraction from the mess in Kansas. “Supersede the Negro-Mania with the almost univers
al excitements of an Anti-Mormon Crusade,” Robert Tyler, a son of former president Tyler, advised. In the spring of 1857, Buchanan fired Young as governor of Utah without the courtesy of informing him and, assuming Young wouldn’t step aside quietly, dispatched 2,500 troops to impose order. In retaliation, Young declared martial law, closed the territory, and demanded that overland immigrants crossing through Utah Territory show a permit. The governor of California protested; closing those trails cut off immigration to the West. Young’s response was that Buchanan had violated the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom when he interfered with the Mormon settlements, and Buchanan had also abrogated the right of a territorial government to self-rule. On September 11, 1857, more than a hundred settlers traveling on the Baker-Fancher wagon train from Arkansas en route to California were besieged, supposedly by a coalition of Paiute Indians and Mormons. The emigrants fought for five days and then surrendered to the attackers, who murdered everyone save seventeen children, none over six years old. The incident would become known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
GRAIN PRICES HAD fallen, inventories of merchandise languished in peeling warehouses, stocks had plummeted, railroads had defaulted, and the land boom had collapsed. Iron mills shut down; publishers closed their doors; ships lay idle. The lines of the unemployed at soup kitchens had grown long. And as the country suffered in what was known as the Panic of 1857, easterners previously unconcerned about or opposed to westward expansion now looked for new markets near the Pacific. The Mormons were thriving.
Buchanan asked Congress for authorization to send four additional regiments to Utah. “At the present moment of depression in the revenues of the country,” he smoothly apologized, “I am sorry to recommend such a measure.” Only an “imposing force,” he said, could convince “these deluded people” of the error of their separatist and barbaric ways. According to Buchanan, the autocratic Young had authorized “acts of hostility” against the soldiers already dispatched to Utah to remove him, and since Young considered himself “governor of the Territory by divine appointment,” and since his people therefore “obey his commands as if these were divine revelations from Heaven,” Buchanan declared that these zealots would fight to the death to keep Young in power—and, not coincidentally, to exclude all other settlers from the territory who didn’t bow to Young’s allegedly divine will. Land had to be available to all white settlers, Mormon and non-Mormon alike. Mormon settlements, as Buchanan’s secretary of war had noted, “lie in the grand pathway which leads from our Atlantic States to the new and flourishing communities growing up upon our Pacific seaboard.” And as Buchanan told Congress, Young had already “tampered” with Indian tribes, turning them “against the United States.”
Persecution again toughened the Mormons. And Young was a very capable leader. During the subsequent Utah War, as it was called, he outsmarted Buchanan. Instead of confronting the army directly, he ordered that its supply lines be cut, its horses stampeded, its trains torched. Livestock was to be driven off. When winter came early, in November, Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston and his troops found themselves trapped with scant supplies in the charred remains of Fort Bridger, which the Mormons had also burned. Young, meanwhile, urged the residents of Salt Lake City and northern Utah to evacuate temporarily to central and southern Utah, where they had stored a part of their harvest.
Buchanan apparently awoke to the fact that this was a war he was going to lose, at least on the publicity front, since the skillful Young and the well-organized Saints were ready to martyr themselves rather than confront the U.S. Army. The press had already turned against Buchanan, and Congress was dubious about the whole affair. Or Buchanan may have realized he could not put down an open and potentially armed rebellion against the Constitution in the West if he would refuse, should the need arise, to do so in the rebellious South. So instead he recurred to the cardinal principle of local government over which the federal government had no constitutional authority.
Young’s replacement, the governor-elect of the Utah Territory, Alfred E. Cumming, was encamped with the troops and planned to meet with Young. Buchanan also sent the Mormon-friendly Thomas L. Kane to join them. The men came to an agreement—a compromise—to end the war. Young retained ecclesiastical power and a great deal of local authority but yielded the governorship to Cumming and allowed the army to occupy the territory as long as it left Salt Lake alone. Although Colonel Johnston and his men remained in Camp Floyd, about forty miles to the southwest of Salt Lake City, they would not attack. Instead, Johnston stayed in Utah until early 1861. When he left, the Saints bought Camp Floyd for ten cents on the dollar. Not long after that, Albert Sidney Johnston, serving as a general in the Confederate army, would be killed at the Battle of Shiloh.
“THE EYES OF the whole Union are fixed on the contest now going on in Illinois between Stephen A. Douglas and Lincoln,” exclaimed the Dallas Herald.
As the Atlantic cable became more and more silent, the country’s internal divisions played out on the Illinois prairie, where the hard-fighting, hard-drinking, pragmatic, and recently principled Stephen Douglas was running for reelection to the Senate against Abraham Lincoln, who had been, until now, unknown except locally. “You are like Byron,” a friend told Lincoln, “who woke up one day and found himself famous.”
The Chicago Press & Tribune had thrown down the gauntlet—“Let Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln agree to canvass the state together, in the old western style,” it had taunted. Knowing Lincoln had nothing to lose and everything to gain from Douglas’s celebrity, the senator would have preferred to ignore the press. Yet he had no choice but to accept the challenge; otherwise he’d be labeled a coward.
And so the contest between the pugnacious, ambitious, famous Little Giant and the gangling, ambitious Honest Abe took shape. It was a test of endurance, not just in terms of the arduous debate schedule between August 21 and October 15 but also in terms of the intensity with which both men argued their positions on the slavery question. Because they knew they were performing on a national stage, Douglas and Lincoln did not discuss tariffs or sugar or land grants and railroads, subjects of local interest in Illinois. Instead, their impassioned subject was slavery, only slavery, pure and simple—though it was neither pure nor simple, since neither debater knew what to do with a whole population of freed slaves, should that come to pass. But the subject was cloaked under the guise of popular sovereignty; that is, the matter of whether citizens had the right to decide for themselves if their government would or would not sustain slavery. Lincoln had been arguing against it since the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, believing that popular sovereignty could be used as a means for perpetuating slavery and denying an entire people their human rights.
Douglas knew he had his hands full. “He is the strong man of the party,” he said of Lincoln, “—full of wit, facts, dates, and the best-stump-speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West.”
The debates took place in seven of the nine congressional districts, where the debaters were typically encircled by picnic tables and drums, by hecklers and horses and peddlers, by plates of ice cream and banners and torchlight processions, by scribbling newspapermen and children not particularly interested in either Douglas or Lincoln, one short, one tall, who had come to town amid a great deal of hoopla.
Neither man was a zealot. In their different ways, both Douglas and Lincoln wished to occupy a middle ground between the abolitionists and the Southern fire-eaters in a country that could and should be committed to its own democratic principles. Both men were what we’d certainly call racists today: as typical nineteenth-century Americans, both considered blacks an inferior people and shared the white supremacist beliefs of most Democrats and Republicans. Yet the racism of each man demonstrated that American racism in general was not monolithic: Lincoln differentiated between what he considered the inferior cast of black people and the right—their natural right—to freedom and the fruits of their labor. Douglas did not differentiate.
To him, freedom meant white people deciding for themselves whether or not to own slaves or to extend slavery. Yet he had stood up—and would continue to do so—to the Southern intransigents. “If slavery be a blessing,” he’d told his Southern colleague Henry Foote, “it is your blessing.” He wanted no part of it.
Lincoln had already stated his point of view on a humid June night in Springfield after he had been nominated by Republicans for the Senate seat. “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ ” the forty-nine-year-old had declared. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
Douglas too had staked out his position. Alienating Buchanan and the pro-Southern Democrats, Douglas said the proslavery Lecompton constitution in Kansas had been a fraud. That is, he held fast to the notion of popular sovereignty which had become, to him and to others, the fundamental right of a democratic nation, and he earned Republican points for it. “The general recognition of the principle of popular sovereignty is all that is needed to restore peace to the country, and to allay the agitation of the Slavery question,” said the moderate New York Times, praising Douglas. “He has shown constancy to this principle [of popular sovereignty] at a cost which proves his sincerity,” claimed a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, newspaper. Other Republican papers applauded Douglas’s courage; he had not flinched when the Buchanan Democrats drubbed him. For that, prominent Republicans such as Horace Greeley supported Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat; he seemed to be one of them, and his Tribune, much read in Illinois, said so. (A well-known Democrat who could stand up to Buchanan and Southern Democrats would serve the Republican cause better than an unknown hick.)
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