Coming to Terms With Utah

Brigham Young, photographed between 1855 and 1865.

(LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

On January 4, 1896, 110 years ago today, Utah became the forty-fifth state to enter the Union. It was hardly a shoo-in. Its territorial legislature had applied for statehood six times between 1849 and 1887, and Congress had consistently refused. Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming had all come in in the meantime, despite several of them having markedly lower populations. The main reason for this was the clash between the religious beliefs of Utah’s Mormon majority and the social mores of mainstream America—a clash that makes today’s culture wars seem mild. Only after a major institutional shift on the part of the Church of Latter-day Saints—a shift on the inflammatory question of polygamy—could Utah finally become a state.

Mormons first arrived in Utah in 1847. Followers of a very young faith—the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had been founded just 17 years earlier—they had experienced persecution from the start. Their founder and first prophet, Joseph Smith, had led an expedition from New York to the Midwest, where he hoped to build a Mormon holy city. That hope was dashed, however, when the people of Missouri reacted bitterly against the newcomers. After abandoning Missouri and trying a second time, in Illinois, to create a religious haven, Smith was murdered by an angry mob. His successor, Brigham Young, understood that Mormons could never worship freely and safely if they stayed in the Midwest. Having read John Fremont’s Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Young announced a daring plan: He and his followers would migrate en masse and found their holy city in the West.

Only a few years later the first Mormons arrived on the shores of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, where Young, as one author put it, “laid out the last city of God.” Likening themselves to the Israelites departing Egypt, they moved across the Western United States in a grueling 1,300-mile exodus that took them over mountains and across deserts. Some 3,000 men, women, and children made the trip dragging their possessions behind them in handcarts. Hundreds died on the journey.

Once they had firmly established themselves in the Utah territory, the Mormons continued to seek acceptance by American society, but the majority of Americans still strongly rejected their customs and political demands, particularly their defense of polygamy. In the 1856 presidential election, the newly formed Republican Party adopted a platform calling for the abolition of America’s “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy. In linking these institutions, abolitionists struck a powerful rhetorical blow against slave owners and generated an indignant backlash among Mormons.

Bowing to political pressure, President James Buchanan decided in 1857 to dodge the issue of slavery by taking up the problem of polygamy. He sent a military force to depose Brigham Young and install a new, non-Mormon territorial governor. Even though open war never broke out, one particularly shameful and bloody incident occurred, the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857, when Mormon rebels attacked a civilian caravan from Arkansas and killed all but a few children in a party of 140.

The 1860s and 1870s, however, brought Utah closer to the rest of the nation. Colonel Patrick Connor arrived there in 1862 with the Third California Volunteers, charged with protecting overland mail routes during the Civil War. Connor became a powerful counterweight to Brigham Young and his church. Overtly anti-Mormon in his approach to government, he was determined to break down the territory’s fierce isolation from modern American society. His soldiers discovered precious metals and thus brought the mining industry to Utah. He also helped lay railroads through the territory, beginning with the transcontinental line, which was completed in 1869. The trains brought more Mormon emigrants to Utah, but they also connected it more closely with the rest of the United States. The territory became increasingly integrated into the national economy.

It was in 1890, however, that Utah took its most substantial steps toward statehood. That year the territorial legislature adopted reforms to its public education system to make it more acceptable to non-Mormons, closing one serious gap between the territory and the nation. Even more important, though, was a proclamation by Wilford Woodruff, the new president of the Mormon church, urging his congregants to obey federal laws against polygamy. The Supreme Court had denied the legality of multiple marriages in 1879, and public opinion strongly supported the decision, so Woodruff’s departure from a fundamental Mormon custom was a legal and political necessity to win statehood.

Congress reacted warmly, passing a law in 1894 stating that Utah could be admitted with “perfect toleration of religious sentiment . . . Provided, That polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited.” Satisfied that its conditions had been met, the federal government admitted Utah two years later. With the resolution of one of the nation’s earliest and most intense disagreements over social policy, the continental nation was almost complete.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com.