ST. GEORGE — Pioneer Day, held annually on July 24, is coming near, the day we celebrate the arrival of pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.
Many Utahns today think it is our statehood day, but it is not. Utah was not granted statehood until 1896, nearly fifty years later. People might reasonably ask why it took so long. The answer provides a story unique in American history.
Statehood came only after decades of conflict between the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints and the federal government, during which Utah held six constitutional conventions and made several failed bids for statehood.
It was not until the church abandoned the practice of polygamy, embraced economic and political pluralism and drafted a constitution that satisfied the United States Congress when statehood was granted.
The root of the problem lay in the fundamentally different views the LDS faithful and the federal government had about what Utah should be like.
The pioneers saw themselves as refugees from religious persecution who had a divine commission to build the Kingdom of God on earth in preparation for Christ’s millennial reign.
Utah, called the state of Deseret by the church, was a place where work was to be done under the direction of their prophet Brigham Young. Congress thought of this as un-American and political heresy.
At the heart of the conflict was federal opposition to theocracy, which church authority taught was “…the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe… and any people attempting to govern themselves by laws of their own making, and by officers of their own appointment, are in direct rebellion against the Kingdom of God.”
In such a system there was no separation of church and state. Church leaders were government leaders by virtue of their callings. Brigham Young was governor and leaders in the church served as legislators and territorial officers. At the local level, LDS bishops served as mayors and administered justice through courts.
None of this sat well with Congress, which denied Deseret’s petition for statehood and instead created the Territory of Utah. In 1850 President Millard Fillmore appointed Brigham Young as governor and three non-LDS federal judges, a territorial secretary, and an Indian agent.
Upon arriving in Salt Lake City the officers attended a Church meeting at which Brigham Young rebuked the federal government for its unwillingness to protect the Latter-day Saints in Missouri and Illinois, going so far as to accuse federal officials of complicity in Joseph Smith’s murder.
Newly appointed Justice Perry Brocchus rose and defended the government, denying any federal complicity in the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. But he did not stop when he should have and nearly created a riot by chastising the audience for its lack of both patriotism and morality, even questioning the virtue of the women in the audience.
After quieting the angry congregation, Brigham Young said Brocchus was “either profoundly ignorant or willfully wicked” saying if the truth of Brocchus’s statements were to be debated “there may be either pulling of hair or cutting of throats.”
He concluded by saying: “I love the government and the Constitution of the United States, but I do not love the damned rascals who administer the government.” It was a rocky start to federal relations.
Other disputes followed; over how to conduct the territorial census, control of federal funds for administering territorial affairs, and the general conduct of those sent to administer the territorial government.
The pioneers felt patronized by carpetbaggers, whom Brigham Young later referred to as “infernal, dirty, sneaking, rotten-hearted, pot-house politicians,” while many federal appointees felt threatened by the harsh rhetoric and lack of deference to their authority.
Fearing for their safety, Justice Brocchus and his fellow appointees quickly returned to the states, carrying with them tales of polygamy, “destroying angels,” and despotic theocratic rule. Within a year, criticism of the Latter-day Saints became even worse when for the first time the practice of plural marriage was made public.
Sensational accounts about polygamy and theocracy fed public indignation about affairs in Utah leading Republicans in their 1856 platform to condemn polygamy as one of the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery being the other.
Any hope of statehood was out of the question as new petitions for statehood were denied. Religious bigotry was clearly at play, but Brigham Young’s flamboyant rhetoric did not help matters, nor did the struggle for judicial supremacy between federally appointed justices and legislatively appointed probate judges.
The appointment of federal judges of questionable character made matters even worse. Justice W.W. Drummond, whom Brigham Young called “a rotten-hearted, loathsome reptile,” was a target of disdain both because of his attempt to assert federal authority over the probate courts and because of his personal life.
Soon after Drummond’s arrival in Salt Lake City, Utahns learned that the woman he introduced as his wife and who sometimes joined him on the bench was, in fact, a prostitute. Relations with Drummond became so bad that a probate judge even attempted to place him under house arrest.
Fed up with Utah and fearful for his safety, Drummond left for the states in 1857. In his resignation letter to President James Buchanan he charged the Latter-day Saints with ignoring the rule of law, spurning Congress and the constitution, and recognizing no authority but the priesthood
“Mormons look to [Brigham Young] alone, for the law by which they are to be governed,” Drummond wrote, urging the president to appoint a non-Mormon governor backed by federal troops.
For their part, territorial legislators were glad to see Drummond gone. In a letter to President Buchanan they wrote that if Washington continued to appoint “office seekers and corrupt demagogues,” Utah would “send them away.”
Instead of inspiring Buchanan to send more qualified appointees, the letter caused Buchanan to declare that Utah was “in a state of substantial rebellion against the laws and authority of the United States,” and that he was “bound to restore the supremacy of the Constitution and laws within its limits.”
That spring, Buchanan ordered 2,500 soldiers to escort new justices and a territorial governor to Utah. Colonel Sidney A. Johnston commanded the troops of the “Utah Expedition” and it was only through the intervention of a long-time friend of the Latter-day Saints, Thomas Kane, that disaster was averted.
He successfully brokered an agreement between Brigham Young and Governor Alfred Cumming that Utahns would yield to federal authority and that the Army would keep its distance. Colonel Johnston established Camp Floyd, fifty miles southwest of Salt Lake City where his troops stayed until the outbreak of the Civil War.
During Governor Cumming’s administration, Utah’s relations with the federal government improved, but statehood continued to be denied. When Cumming stepped down, Abraham Lincoln appointed an Indiana newspaper editor named John W. Dawson as territorial governor.
But the appointment only lasted three weeks after Dawson allegedly made “grossly improper proposals” to an attractive Salt Lake City widow who fended him off with a coal shovel.
Dawson quickly left Utah and was replaced by Stephen Harding, who declared his support for a newly passed anti-polygamy bill and his commitment to “make treason dumb” in Utah.
This did not endear him to Utahns and Brigham Young soon said of Harding: “If you were to fill a sack with cow dung, it would be the best thing you could do for an imitation.” By the fall of 1863, Harding threw in the towel and returned to the states.
Most federal troops were now fighting in the Civil War, but to back up federal appointees, a group of California volunteers under the command of Colonel Patrick E. Connor were deployed to Salt Lake City.
Over Brigham Young’s objections they established their base in the foothills east of the city, naming it Fort Douglas in honor of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas. By now the governorship of Utah was on no one’s short list for patronage jobs and the next decade saw a revolving door of eight undistinguished men taking turns occupying the office.
Until the end of the Civil War the federal government’s attention was directed elsewhere and Utah enjoyed relative calm. A significant exception was fallout from the Mountain Meadows Massacre which, together with polygamy, became the subject of sensational stories in newspapers throughout the country.
Many people became convinced that Brigham Young had ordered the massacre, and much time and effort was invested in a fruitless effort to indict him. In the meantime, Utah’s hopes for statehood languished.
Following the war and well into the 1870s, non-LDS businessmen tried to challenge the Church’s control of Utah’s economy, politics, and courts. They saw an opening in the mining and railroad industries, both of which created new wealth and brought thousands of non-LDS voters and consumers to Utah.
The businessmen established the town of Corrine, on the Union Pacific line west of Brigham City, hoping to make it the primary rail connection for mines in Idaho and Montana, and perhaps even replace Salt Lake City as the territorial capital. But the town plunged into obscurity when the Church constructed the Utah & Northern Railroad from Ogden to Franklin, Idaho, bypassing Corrine altogether.
The schism in Utah was laid bare in the political realm as well, with LDS Church members voting as a block for The People’s Party and those not of the faith voting as a block for The Liberal Party.
Battle lines were drawn in the news media too, with the Deseret News serving as voice for the LDS Church and The Salt Lake Tribune as voice for everyone else. Hyperbolic volleys were lobbed in both directions, much like what we see today on Fox News and CNN.
Neither side was willing to abandon its view of what Utah should be. It was a stalemate with both sides entrenched, each hoping to realize their aspirations for the future state they believed would soon be created.
By 1877, thirty years after the pioneers reached the Salt Lake Valley, Utah’s bid for statehood was dead in the water. Despite four new constitutional conventions and more petitions for statehood, Congress still said “no.”
Church leaders were unwilling to yield on polygamy and theocracy, considering them matters of religious freedom, while Congress was unwilling to admit Utah to the union with them in the bargain.
As newspapers, ministers, and political leaders piled on, federal pressure grew. But to faithful Latter-day Saints, federal pressure was nothing more than religious intolerance and an abuse of their right to freely exercise their religion.
Something had to give. In the late summer of 1877, Brigham Young died of a ruptured appendix. He had been president and prophet for over thirty years, but now was gone.
What might happen next was anyone’s guess. As fate would have it, nearly two more decades passed before statehood was finally granted, and then only after Congress upped the ante with draconian legislation that nearly destroyed the church.
But that is a story for next week, in part two of ‘Utah’s Statehood.’
Editor’s note: Sources for this article include Andrew Love Neff’s “History of Utah: 1847 to 1869,” B.H. Roberts’s “Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” John H. Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet,” and various articles in the Journal of Mormon History and Utah Historical Quarterly.
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Photo Gallery
Colonel Sidney A. Johnston commanded the troops of the “Utah Expedition” | Photo courtesy National Park Service, St. George News Portrait of Brigham Young taken in 1850 when he was both President of the LDS Church and Governor of the Territory of Utah | Photo courtesy LDS Church History Library, St. George News An anti-LDS cartoon from the 1870s, showing Brigham Young as a bearded goat carrying a pan flute labeled “polygamy” pointing to a poster warning “All Gentiles found on these premises shall be shot” | Image courtesy Wikipedia, St. George News An anti-LDS cartoon from the 1860s: The Mormon Problem Solved: Brigham Young telling President Grant "I must submit to your laws - but what shall I do with these" (wives and children); Grant replies: "Do as I do - give them offices” | Courtesy Library of Congress, St. George News Johnston’s Army, the troops of the “Utah Expedition,” created Camp Floyd, west of Saratoga Springs, as their headquarters | Photo courtesy Utah History Encyclopedia, St. George News Completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 changed the economic and demographic composition of the Territory of Utah and fed aspirations of non-LDS businessmen to scale back the influence of the LDS Church in Utah | Photo courtesy National Park Service, St. George News In 1857, President James Buchanan declared that Utah was “in a state of substantial rebellion against the laws and authority of the United States” and sent an army of 2,500 troops to back up federal authority in Utah | Photo courtesy Wikipedia, St. George News Brigham Young died in 1877, leaving unresolved Utah’s aspirations for statehood. This image is of a funeral march written on the occasion of his memorial services | Photo courtesy LDS Church History Library, St. George News Perry Brocchus, a Democrat from Alabama, was appointed Associate Justice to the Territory of Utah in 1850 by President Millard Fillmore | Photo courtesy Special Collections of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, St. George News The State of Deseret, as envisioned by the Latter-day Saints in 1847, included all of present-day Utah, most of Nevada, and parts of Arizona, California, Idaho, Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Oregon | Map courtesy Utah State Historical Society, St. George News Stephen Harding, whom Abraham Lincoln appointed territorial governor in 1862, promised to “make treason dumb” in Utah. Brigham Young said of Harding: “If you were to fill a sack with cow dung, it would be the best thing you could do for an imitation” | Photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society, St. George News
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