Lincoln and the Mormons

Mormons! America just can’t get enough of them.

They are running for president — not one, but two of them.

They have a runaway hit on Broadway.

And 150 years ago, they were running in the opposite direction of the Civil War.

Indeed, Mormons had been running away from the United States for some time. Practically since the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830, its disciples had been on the lam, and for good reason, as they encountered brutality in one place after another.

They were attacked for their unusual religious, anthropological and sexual beliefs (which included claims that ancient Jews had emigrated from the Holy Land to North America, where they had turned into native Americans, as revealed by golden tablets of scripture buried in upstate New York). And they were attacked for the irritating certainty with which they upheld these beliefs.

And let’s not even go near the magic underpants.

Hence, a series of westward migrations, in a modern version of the Book of Exodus, that took them from upstate New York to Ohio to Missouri, and to Nauvoo, Ill., near where the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, was executed by a violent mob in 1844. Finally, the Mormon remnant escaped all known jurisdictions, and in 1847 arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, where Brigham Young said, “This is the place.”

“The place” was not especially desirable at the time, but over the decades has grown spectacularly so. In 1847, it was still part of Mexico, though barely, and it came into U.S. possession with the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. With the discovery of gold in California, overland travel increased, and soon the lonely landscapes of the Utah Territory were enlivened by the sight of pony express riders and a steady stream of would-be millionaires.

From the moment of their arrival in Utah, the Mormons set up a
government of their own, with no connection whatsoever to the United States. This shadow state, called Deseret, was presided over by Brigham Young, and administered law and morality in the way of the biblical patriarchs. Like many of those patriarchs, they defined marriage with a convenient elasticity — in this case, through the right of a God-fearing Mormon to take as many wives as he chose — and that was another reason Mormons often fell afoul of government officials.

But the United States also sought to govern its new territory, rapidly growing in relevance, even if nine out of 10 of its inhabitants were Mormons and highly skeptical of distant federal officials. In 1858, a Utah Expedition, under General Albert Sidney Johnston, was dispatched to bring submission; instead, it caused hundreds of deaths, cost $15 million and accomplished none of its objectives. Modern Mormon histories still refer to this episode as “the occupation.” An uneasy standoff lingered throughout the election of 1860 and the outbreak of war.

These facts added up to an unusual predicament for Abraham Lincoln in the fall of 1861. Most Americans were thinking about the North and South; but the West was on his mind as well. With the rebellion raging, Lincoln needed as many allies as he could find, and both his government and Jefferson Davis’s coveted the west for its minerals and its access to the Pacific. Could he count on the Mormons?

There was plenty of room for doubt. Like the Confederates, the Mormons had a strong aversion to federal control, favored a peculiar institution (polygamy) that had been likened to slavery, and had been denounced by Lincoln’s party. The Republican platform had specifically ridiculed polygamy and slavery as “twin relics of barbarism.”

At the same time, most Mormons came from northern states, and were deeply religious. Even if their beliefs contradicted Christianity in certain ways — a fact that continues to animate attacks on Mormonism as a cult — they had no great love for slavery. To the extent that they even thought about politics back east, the arrival of a bearded president with the name of a biblical patriarch must have been welcome. Some Mormons thought that the rebellion signaled the beginning of a holy war that would remake the world and end in the second coming of Christ.

Fascinatingly, Joseph Smith had prophesied in 1832 that an immense civil war would someday transform America, and that it would start in South Carolina.

On Oct. 20, 1861, a vital piece of the Utah puzzle was solved, as the final lines of a telegraph were strung together, linking the
Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, through an office in Salt Lake City. On that auspicious occasion, which spoke so loudly of union, Brigham Young remarked,“Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country.” Those were words guaranteed to warm Lincoln’s heart. Two days later, more good news, as General J. Arlington Bennett wrote him to ask if he could recruit 1,000-10,000 Mormons to fight for the Union.

But the question was far from solved, and on Nov. 18, Lincoln attacked the Mormon question in a most Lincolnian way. Instead of ordering an invasion, Lincoln ordered information. Specifically, he asked the Library of Congress to send him a pile of books about Mormonism, so that the aggregator-in-chief could better understand them. These included “The Book of Mormon” in its original 1831 edition, and three other early studies of the Mormons, with extensive, lurid chapters covering their polygamy. For some reason, he also ordered a volume of Victor Hugo, in French, a language he could not read.

Fortified by his reading, Lincoln came to a great decision. And that decision was to do nothing. Sometimes that, too, can be a form of leadership — what Churchill called “a masterly inactivity.”

Typically, Lincoln reached his decision through a homely parable, told to a Mormon emissary:

When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farm which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn, and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone I will let him alone.

That parable is about as much as we will get in the way of a formal explanation, but it is enough. To his generous store of common sense, we might also add the freshness of Lincoln’s memories of the bloodshed at Nauvoo in 1844, when angry mobs had killed the Mormon leaders, with elected officials standing by and doing nothing. And the centrality of Utah to the grand vision of a transcontinental republic, embraced fully by America’s most western president to date.

The U.S.-Mormon relationship never was perfect. Throughout the Civil War, it was tested on both sides. A Republican Congressman, Justin Morrill of Vermont, introduced legislation banning polygamy in Utah in 1862. Lincoln signed it, but in another sign of masterly inactivity, did not choose to enforce it. Tensions flared up between the U.S. army (stationed around Salt Lake City to protect the telegraph and stage lines) and the locals in 1863. Nor were the Mormons exactly model citizens. Throughout the war, when they referred to “the president,” they usually meant Brigham Young, and the not-quite-legal state of Deseret continued to hold meetings of its officers until 1870. Young disliked abolitionists and “black-hearted Republicans,” and it was not until 1978 that African-Americans were invited to join the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints..

But ultimately, sanity prevailed, for the good of both the Mormons and the United States. In 1869, when the final spike of transcontinental railroad was driven into the ground, that happy act of union took place in Promontory, Utah. Lincoln had authorized that route, way back in 1862.

Whether a Mormon will ever succeed Lincoln remains to be seen. But the fact that it is possible at all, with Utah a reliably patriotic part of the United States, is one of the many ways in which, 150 years later, we still live in Abraham Lincoln’s America.

Sources: thelincolnlog.org; Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, “The Mormon Experience”; Henry Mayhew, “The Mormons; or, Latter-Day Saints”; Ray C. Colton, “The Civil War in the Western Territories”; “Utah: A Guide to the State”; James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, “The Story of the Latter-Day Saints.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly suggested that African-Americans were unable to join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints until 1978; it was the priesthood they were unable to join. Also, Joseph Smith was executed near, rather than in, Nauvoo, Ill.

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Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”