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Show Buchanan and Frémont observed the protocols of the time by letting their supporters do the campaigning. Less than a week after the Republican convention, former Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton launched an attack upon President Franklin Pierce for not taking action against the Mor mons. Benton had been an archnemesis of the saints since the late 1830s when Missouri ultras had driven them from the state. The intervening years had not softened his opposition. He now claimed that Utah represented a “state of things at which morality, decency, [and] shame revolts,” with Brigham Millard Fillmore, who was elected Young defiant in his power. As a leading president in 1850, ran in the 1856 Democrat, Benton was trying to prevent the as a candidate of the Whig— Republicans from tar r ing the Grand American—and Know Nothing Democracy with the Mor mon brush— Party. making people think that popular sovereignty somehow put the Democrats on the side of the saints. When it came time to cast his vote, Benton went for Buchanan, despite being Frémont’s fatherin-law.35 Republican Congressman Justin S. Morrill of Vermont also used strong language. Morrill, one of the party’s founding fathers, labeled polygamy an “abomination” and created a “sensation” in the House by proposing national legislation to end it. He was aiming squarely at overturning Democratic constitutional doctrine, claiming that Washington had “exclusive jurisdiction” in the territories and that “no principle of self-government or citizen sovereignty” could possibly justify Mormon plurality. His bill called for a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars against polygamists and a stiff prison sentence of two to five years on any “person” marrying a plural spouse or sexually “cohabiting” with them. Morrill’s loosely drawn 35 Extract of Thomas H. Benton’s Speech at St Louis, June 21, 1856, from unnamed newspaper, Historian’s Office, Historical Scrapbooks, 1840-1904, box 1, folder 4, book 4, page 42, Church History Library. 119 U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES ELECTION OF 1856 |
