Utah Territory

And then years after Joseph Smith's death, he reconsidered his relationship with Mormonism.

After eight years outside the faith, he was re-baptized on March 8th, 1846 by Orson Hyde in Nauvoo- And then Luke traveled west with Brigham Young's pioneer company in 1847, and while he was never restored as an apostle, he did eventually serve as a bishop in the Utah Territory.

I think that's quite an interesting story.

I agree.

Brigham Young, we know, was eventually removed from his governor position in consequence of the Utah War of 1857, but he left peacefully and without conflict.

So this in turn followed decades of conflict between the saints and the federal government over the practice of plural marriage and also the political and the temporal influence of the church in the Utah Territory.

That was a big issue.

And when the manifesto was issued in 1890, it effectively opened the door to Utah statehood.

In May of 1861, the family sailed from Liverpool to New York on the ship Monarch of the Sea, arriving in June.

From there, they traveled overland from Florence, Nebraska to Utah Territory in the 6th to C. Johnson Pioneer Company, arriving on September 27, 1861.

The family settled in Springville, Utah County, where their daughter Emma Sarah was born in December 1861.

Then in Utah, William practiced plural marriage and he married Hester Huggett.

And the header says, So that's always so neat to just dive into the records and learn a little bit more about them.

So this was a brief entry.

And from this, we learned that William was a native of England and and was living in Utah County, Utah Territory, at the time of his naturalization.

He appeared alongside another man, Robert Shine, who was naturalized in the same session, and the ditto marks after Robert Shine's name indicate that the same phrase about being a native of England applied to both men, and was the same presiding judge, Judge Emerson.

Would that there was a novel that our electorate was electrified by in some way.

Now, in the wake of the compromise of 1850, the country now though had to face this question, not just what you're going to do with the Mexican cession territories, that's going to take a A lot of northerners are pissed off about the nature of the Utah Territory Bill and the New Mexico Territory Bill, because there are southerners who immediately proposed slave territories for Utah and New Mexico.

But the real question, by 1853 and early 1854, was all the territory that was left, of the Louisiana Purchase, the Kansas and Nebraska territories, which is simply what they were at that point in time.

Now it is worth stopping for a moment to realize that not every American woke up in 1851, 1852, 1853, and worried every moment of every day about the expansion of slavery.

That was that vow that northerners concerned about the expansion of slavery could always assume the great Northwest would be free of slavery.

But half of California, half of it's above it, had the Compromise of 1850, and half the Mexican Cession is above it.

And now you've said popular sovereignty will determine the Utah Territory and not the Missouri Compromise.

So which rule is in play? Which principle do you apply? Do you apply the oldest principle of the Northwest Ordinance from 1787? The Northwest Ordinance, folks, had said slavery shall never exist in the Northwest Territory, which became those five states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, will never exist.

was written in 1863 by a guy named Fritz Hugh Ludlow, who was a reporter for the Atlantic Monthly.

And he arrives in the Utah Territory.

And when he arrives in town, he's introduced to Porter Rockwell.

And the first thing he notes was that he was taken aback by Porter's kind of warm welcome.

It's really difficult to do the same thing with the Achan Massacre because of the complexity surrounding the sources linked to it.

Yeah, so here's a quick sketch of what we basically know, right? So the Achan Massacre...

refers to the killing of a group of California travelers who entered Utah territory during the Utah War, late 1857.

The party included Thomas and John Aiken and a couple other guys.

In 1894, President Grover Cleveland issued a proclamation pardoning bigamists, adulterers, polygamists, and unlawful cohabitants, primarily targeting members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known as Mormons.

This act restored their property, which had been taken away during the government's efforts to eliminate polygamy in the Utah Territory.

And in 1957, the Little Rock Nine began their first full day of classes at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, under the protection of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne.

And in 2018, Bill Cosby was sentenced to three to ten years in state prison for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand in 2004.

As I said earlier, the Kansas and Nebraska territories are everything that's left of the old Louisiana Purchase.

That's the brown area, the darker brown area, the New Mexico territory, the Utah territory.

California is shown here already in the Union.

It's not until 1850.

Anyway, last but not least here, Southerners have come to realize, and they're going to tell their Northern colleagues this every chance they get, that the legal status of slavery in the Western territories always stood for them as a measure of its moral standing everywhere.

You condemn slavery in the West.

You condemn slavery in Utah Territory.

You're condemning it in Alabama.

In January 1852, the Utah Territorial Legislature took up what became an act in relation to service.

The legislature was entirely Mormon, and Brigham Young was simultaneously president of the Mormon Church and governor of Utah Territory.

On July 23, 1852, addressing the joint session, Young said, quote, With regard to slavery, inasmuch as I believe in the Bible, inasmuch as I believe in the ordinances of God and in the priesthood order of God, I believe in slavery, end quote.

He argued Black people carried a biblical curse and that slavery, properly administered, was for their own good.

Mm-hmm.

And, and after he left the army, he sticks around in Utah and became a key promoter of mining in the Utah Territory, and he kind of turns into, uh, Brigham Young's primary nemesis.

Um, uh-

[laughs]

... like, he's trying to promote mining and get people to come into Utah Territory so that the power of the church will be less.

Brigham Young is trying to discourage mining and keep people from coming in that aren't Latter-day Saints, 'cause he wants to preserve the community.

But weirdly enough-