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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY militia to keep order. Bernhisel was trying to put out fires, and his various denials were a catalog about what was being said about the Mormons.21 Bernhisel’s private letters to Young were also full of foreboding. Congress would never reconfirm Young as governor as things stood, Bernhisel told the Mormon leader. The best that could be done was to let the matter slide, which effectively would allow Young to stay in office into the indefinite future. Meanwhile, Bernhisel told Young to expect no favors from Congress, like the building of a new road from Great Salt Lake City to Fort Bridger or paying off some of the costs of a recent “Walker” Indian war. He also warned that Utah’s new attempt to secure statehood was doomed from the start. “The bitter and cruel prejudice against us as a people is such, ostensibly on account of the plurality doctrine, but the true cause probably lies much deeper.”22 Bernhisel was speaking of the prejudice that he was meeting on every side. The question of statehood also raised the explosive issue of whether “popular sovereignty” applied to Utah. 23 What was good for the Democrats’ goose (the extension of slavery) might equally serve the Mormon gander (polygamy), Republicans were sure to say. For Americans unwilling to accept Utah’s unusual marriage system, Utah statehood showed just how pernicious the constitutional doctrine of “popular sovereignty” might be. Popular sovereignty and polygamy had been linked before. Shortly after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, newspapers opposed to Douglas in Illinois had suggested that the senator had a hidden purpose. Douglas, who had forged friendly or at least political ties with the Mormons while they were his constituents, had used the phrase domestic institutions when writing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. What institutions did Douglas have in mind besides slavery, it was asked? Could he also be talking about polygamy? The prominent, early twentieth-century historian-politician, Albert J. Beveridge, reviewing the political back-and-forth in Illinois in the middle 1850s, put polygamy at the head of a list of secondary issues facing Douglas in the state’s political wars, after the extension of slavery itself.24 Nor had the linkage passed the notice of Senator Sumner, who saw the political and moral advantage of putting polygamy and popular sovereignty side-by-side. “I presume no person could contend that a polygamous husband, resident in one of the States, would be entitled to enter the national Territory with his harem—his property if you please—and there claim immunity,” Sumner had protested when the Kansas-Nebraska Law was being debated in the nation. “Clearly, when he [the polygamist] passes 22 Bernhisel to Brigham Young, January 17, 1856 and March 18, 1856, Church History Library. Last citation has the quotation. 23 New York Times, March 19 and June 3, 1856. 24 Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809-1858, 4 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), 3:236-7. 116 |
