The Mormons have been called, ‘the Jews of America’, and there is some basis for the comparison. Of course, virtually every minority in the United States has received that appellation at one time or another, but for the Mormons the parallels are more clearly drawn. Both religious groups lie outside the Protestant mainstream and to the uninformed can appear peculiar or even outré. Both peoples are thrifty, hard-working, highly supportive of others inside their group, usually prosperous, and both keep to themselves. Unlike the Jews the Mormons do proselytize. Throughout their history the Mormons have also accepted more highly centralized control of their secular lives and religious doctrines, more centralized by far than any Jewish culture of contemporary history.
For their clannishness, their strangeness, their prowess at converting others, and in no small part for their prosperity, the Mormons had been driven from New York, Missouri, and Illinois. Under the leadership of Brigham Young they had journeyed far west, past the fertile river valleys of Nebraska and Kansas, across the alkali desert, to a place wonderful, strange and unique in North America. Beside the now-shrunken shore of an inland sea that had once covered western Utah, Brigham Young bade his people build their homes, plant their crops and found a new land, called Deseret. As the Great Salt Lake has no outlet but evaporation, its water is many times saltier than seawater, making it useless for irrigation. But the Jordan, Weber and Bear Rivers bring in quantities of fresh water from the mountains above the lake, and by their use the Mormons hoped to make the desert bloom… and did. Converts flowed in from the eastern United States and from Britain, Salt Lake City boomed, and plans were laid for the construction of a great temple. Mormon troops fought in the Mexican War, and when the United States created Utah as a territory from the ceded lands it was natural that Brigham Young should be the territorial governor. For more than a decade the Mormons prospered, and gloried in their splendid isolation.
The accumulation of so much power in the hands of Brigham Young led to concern that Mormon Deseret might declare itself a sovereign nation, laying claim to the unsettled center third of the United States. This apprehension, fueled by discomfort with the Mormon religion and outrage at their practice of polygamy, caused President Bright to appoint a different territorial governor in 1859, a fellow Indianan whom the Mormons refused to acknowledge. Beset with other troubles, the Bright administration had simply let the issue drop. During Lincoln’s trip to Washington for his inauguration, he made numerous stops at towns and cities along the way, and at one, he was asked what he proposed to do about the Mormons. “If they will not trouble the government,” he said, “I propose to let them alone.” This was entirely to Brigham Young’s satisfaction; after a mob of men in Illinois had slain Joseph Smith and forced the Mormons out of Nauvoo, the Mormons fervently wished to keep a distance from the rest of the United States. But this happy felicity was not to last; as the American Indians could have told them, there was no place so desolate or remote that Americans would not eventually come there.
Without rapid, efficient means of travel across the Great Plains, it was all too easy to see that distance and diverging interests would push the Pacific states toward independence. The easiest method of securing the Pacific Coast to the nation’s heartlands – a transcontinental railroad – would also open up the interior to settlement. By making it feasible to rapidly move troops to counter Indian raids, to bring settlers and manufactured products in and ship crops out to markets, the railroad would make the population of the West explode. Without a railroad, it simply was not possible to build a fort and station a body of troops every few hundred miles across the length and breadth of the Great Plains, nor was it cost-efficient to break the tough, thick sod of the Great Plains when land on the Pacific coast was still unclaimed. But a railroad would require an unheard-of amount of capital investment, encounter unprecedented difficulties and – given the unenviable track record of American railroad companies – might well fail anyway. The task was simply monumental – and desperately urgent. Telegrams from California and Oregon reported the growing strength of independence movements. Fremont had not opened a rebellion, but his charismatic powers were as strong as ever, as confirmed by the thousands he drew to rallies and torch-light parades. California’s population was about equally split between North and South – so evenly split that the state legislature was hotly debating a proposal to split the state in two, south of San Francisco – and it was thought likely that Fremont was receiving substantial help from Confederate agents.
Brigham Young was fully in favor of a railroad, and the sooner one could be constructed, the better he would like it. If possible he wanted the road to run through Salt Lake City, and if it could not he wanted it as close-by as possible. He rightly saw that Mormon labor, crops and water would be indispensable for construction and maintenance of the road, and that Salt Lake City, the church and the people would all profit hugely from the building, and from the commerce that would follow. Easy, inexpensive travel would make it possible for Mormon converts to move west and swell the numbers of the colony, perhaps enough to form a base of power strong enough to resist the intolerance of the outside world. What Brigham Young did not want, however, was what was now headed in his direction: thousands of troops of the US Army. Memories of persecution were too strong and too recent for Brigham Young to trust anyone in the federal government, much less armed men who might turn on and destroy his people.
It was self-evident to the Lincoln administration that their best hope of containing an explosion in California would be to increase the number of troops there. While the sea-voyage around Cape Horn might be marginally faster and safer, the purchase of civilian ships to swell the numbers of the blockading fleets had at least temporarily depleted the number of big, fast ships suitable for a trip to California. Also, troops moving overland could be expected to search out water and survey routes for the upcoming railroad. They were certain that Young and the Mormons would understand the urgency and necessity, but they were mistaken. Young had resolved to have no armed men enter his temple city, and Young was accustomed to getting what he wanted. The Lincoln administration was equally determined not to back down and risk losing California, but it did send instructions to its military officers to ‘pass quietly through’ and give no cause for violence.
All hope of a quiet passage vanished on a glorious sunny morning in July of 1861 when foragers from the 2nd US Creole Dragoons crossed a dry creek bed and started up the meadow on the far side. Private First Class Jean-Baptiste Ros threw both arms up in the air, the boom of the shot arriving as he went face-down in the dry grass. Two others were wounded retrieving his body, for the Creoles never would abandon one of their own, even one so obviously dead as Private Ros. As the commander of the Creole Dragoon divisions pulled his men back and pondered his next move, Brigham Young was already preparing for the evacuation of Utah. The half-finished temple would be razed and covered over, the city and all the outlying towns abandoned and the people set on a seemingly impossible exodus, overland in the summer drought to Vancouver Island. To the men of his Nauvoo Legion, Young entrusted the duty of keeping the invaders at bay until the crops could be gathered. To a secret few he confided the grim task of burning the crops, if they could not be safely harvested. And there the matter rested, while the Army and the Lincoln administration considered their next move.
On the eastern side of the continent, all eyes were fixed on the prospective negotiations between delegates of the Confederacy and the Union. After several false starts and more than a few disputes over procedure that consumed July and a part of August, a deal was finally struck. The venue was switched to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, whose halls were empty for the summer and whose grounds provided privacy and security. The new site had the added advantage that the Confederates could arrive and depart by boat, avoiding at a stroke the possibility that they would attempt to rouse the citizens of Virginia and Maryland. It was also remote enough from the sophisticated pleasures of a city to encourage the delegates to finish their task with dispatch.
John Bell of Tennessee gaveled the session to order on Monday, August 26th. The first days were filled with thunderous oratory, but the real business was conducted in more informal fashion in the evenings, over culinary delicacies, brandy and cigars. From the outset it was the Virginia and Tennessee delegations who labored upon the points that would draw the two sides together, but there were not many of those. The points of contention were many, and sharp; the Federals were interested only in securing a pledge to restore the Union and the Confederates were insistent that the remaining slave states must be free to ‘go South’ when they wished. It was vain for the Tennesseans to say that they were content to remain in the Union, at least for now. “The Southern Confederacy is the natural home of all the slave states,” proclaimed Edmund Ruffin. The Virginian had moved to South Carolina on that state’s secession, and his scorn for the men of his native state who had remained with the Union was unconcealed. “You will come to us, or we will bring you! And not a dog of a Yankee will dare to stop us!”
By Friday it was apparent that the differences were unbridgeable, but the delegates decided to continue into the next week in the hope of salvaging something. Monday’s session was perfunctory. On Tuesday, September 3rd, William Porcher Miles rose from his seat and displayed the headlines of a Washington newspaper. “The Republicans have deceived us,” he roared. “Even as we meet here, their Congress has authorized a Force Bill! As with the butcher, Jackson, this despot Lincoln will use the Army to compel us back into the hated, deceitful Union! And we shall not go – we shall fight, and if necessary, die for our rights as free men!” He hurled the paper to the table, and with no further speeches the Southerners stalked from the hall. A mournful Robert Hunter of Virginia provided the last, sad footnote as the Union delegates also prepared to depart. “I do not know what response other states may give, sirs, but I do not think Virginia will remain in a Union that prepares to make war upon its own people.” If anyone attempted to point out his logical inconsistencies, it is not recorded.
And indeed, scarcely a week later the secession convention in Richmond ratified Virginia’s withdrawal from the Union. In vain Douglas had offered that the federal government would refrain from calling upon Virginia for troops or assistance. The honor of Virginia had been touched, and from the Union she must go. Scarcely had the news reached the Confederate Congress before they offered to move the capital to Richmond. In vain did the minority point out that there was no connection between Virginia and the rest of the Confederacy; ‘Wait a little,’ the others cried, ‘and all the rest must come!’ In the Northern press it was played up as a corrupt bargain – Virginia’s loyalty, bought for a capital – but that was no more than putting the best face upon the gravest disaster.
Worse was to come. On October 2nd the convention in Arkansas reversed itself and voted for secession, and on the 18th Tennessee did likewise.
And in Boston, and in Utah, the shooting began in earnest.
