LINCOLN AND THE MORMON QUESTION

This piece is part journal - part history:


My daughter and I were talking this morning.  She asked which President was my favorite.  Other than Washington (always the right answer), I said it would be Ronald Reagan.  Just as President Benson was "my Prophet" growing up, so Reagan was "my President". 

We had an awesome band with a yearly budget of $1 million dollars (the band boosters actually ran a bingo hall that was wildly successful with the Canadians coming down to take advantage), so we had whatever we wanted.  My sophomore year, we played at a Reagan rally in Seattle.  From that, we were invited to play at the Inaugural Parade in DC.  We chartered a 767 and flew the whole crew out there.  We had a semi that left a week before for our ground support with all the equipment.  We also had our own used greyhounds for the local trips.  It was quite the operation.  It was a great time to be alive - and in that organization.  I was the fastest kid in the high school as well as one of the bigger kids and was heavily recruited to be a receiver or safety on the football team, though my mother forbade it on the grounds that I might end up paralyzed.  We went to state in football - but it was still cooler to play in the band at the half-time show than to be on the field playing football the rest of the time.  We usually took most competitions - even if we went out of state.  I remember this little potent band from McGrath, Alberta stealing alot of our hardware when there was a competition in eastern Washington - and I always bring that up with people about my age that I meet from that little town.  Small place - a lot of heart......

Anyway - I loved Reagan, politics and persona.  The whole enchilada.  My daughter asked what about Lincoln.  My answer was that he was not super Mormon-friendly - and I mention here that it was from that presidency forward that states' rights were buried and a pervasive sense of Federalism has reigned since then (in opposition to the Millennial model of local control, centrality of the family  and auto-destination - or full agency and personal accountability - that the return of the Patriarchal Order will bring).  Here is something I found from the NYTimes (an opinion blog):

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.