How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [92]
Brigham Young (1801-1877) (photo credit 26.1)
Mormon proposal for state of Deseret
In response, Young organized a predominantly Mormon convention that sent Congress a proposal for a state of Deseret. It stipulated boundaries that encompassed all of the Great Basin between the Rockies and the Sierras and extended to include Southern California with its Pacific ports.
Congress gave it a different border and a different name. Suspicion of the Mormon agenda had only increased with their migration outside the boundaries of the United States. With the U.S. acquisition of this land, the vast boundaries of the Mormons’ proposed state of Deseret further fed the fear that they might eventually declare independence and establish their own nation—right between California and the rest of the United States.
In lieu of the state of Deseret, Congress created the Utah Territory. Its northern and southern boundaries are those that Utah possesses to this day, but at the time they extended westward from the crest of the Rockies to California. Because Utah was designated a territory rather than a state, its governorship became a presidential appointment rather than an elected office. President Zachary Taylor, however, prudently appointed Brigham Young.
Fear that the Mormons might create a separate nation was not, however, as preeminent a national security concern as fear that slave states might create a separate nation. The town of Callville illustrated the connection between both controversies.
In the years just before Callville was founded, the Democrats had been losing ground to a newly formed abolitionist party known as the Republicans. In 1854 Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas sought to cope with slavery (and propel himself to the presidency) by convincing Congress to enact a policy known as “popular sovereignty.” It removed the federal government from deciding where slavery would or would not be allowed, leaving the decision to the individual states and territories. The Mormons seized upon this principle to defend Utah’s right to allow polygamy (the practice was eventually abandoned in 1890 by the church’s main branch). The Democrats responded by, first, disagreeing, and second, making Mormon polygamy a campaign issue in the 1856 presidential election. In so doing, they hoped to disentangle themselves from the Mormons’ inconvenient logic and, by fanning fears regarding marriage and morality, to divert attention from their party’s highly nuanced position regarding slavery.
They succeeded. The shift in attitudes was reflected in the nationwide publication The Saturday Evening Post. In 1849 the magazine published positive commentary regarding the proposed state of Deseret:
The progress of the Mormon sect in this country, when duly considered, must be regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon of the times. From small beginnings they have gone on increasingly steadily, in spite of persecutions and hardships.… But the strangeness of the thing consists in the wonderful and rapid extension of a faith of which so little is known, and which had its origin in stories and devices apparently the most absurd that ever made mockery of human credibility. The converts to this faith, moreover, do not appear to belong to that class of enthusiasts that give way to hallucinations. The Mormons are a practical people; they are industrious, temperate, orderly. Wherever they plant themselves in the wilderness, the aspect of a cultivated region is soon visible.
Following the 1856 election, the same magazine sounded the alarm:
The accounts from Utah—or as the “saints” now insist on its being called, “Deseret”—are chock-full of fight.… It will be noticed by the threat relative to Jackson County, Missouri, that some of these fanatics really cherish the delusion of ultimate success, in the case of war with the United States.… It’s a pity that proper measures were not taken years ago to remove this cancer, when it was comparatively small and powerless.
After the Democrats won the White House in 1856, newly elected President James