At Washington, the Church's attorney, Mr. Franklin S. Richards, and delegate John T. Caine supported the petition with their avowals of the sincerity of the Church leaders, the genuineness of our political division, and the sanctity with which we regarded the promise to obey the laws. The Utah Commission, a non-Mormon body, favored amnesty in an official report of September, 1892. And when I went to Washington, in the winter of 1892-3, the changed attitude of the Federal authorities toward us was strikingly evident.
President Harrison issued his amnesty proclamation, early in January, 1893, to all persons liable to the penalties of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, but "on the express condition that they shall in the future faithfully obey the laws of the United States... and not otherwise." The proclamation concluded: "Those who fail to avail themselves of the clemency hereby offered will be vigorously prosecuted." Not a polygamist in Utah, to my knowledge, declined to take advantage of the mercy, by refusing the expressly implied pledge.
Meanwhile the campaign had been continued for the return of the escheated Church property and for the passage of an Enabling Act that should permit the territory to organize for statehood.
[FOOTNOTE: Statehood seemed still very faraway. There was a Trans-Mississippi Congress held at Ogden in 1892, and though the delegates—coming from all the states and territories "west of the river," were the guests of the people of Utah, so hopeless was our status in the consideration of mankind that the delegates from the territories of New Mexico and Arizona would not let our names be joined to theirs in a resolution for statehood which we wished the committee on resolutions to propose to the Congress. Governor Prince of New Mexico replied, to our plea for a share in the resolution, that he did not intend to damn New Mexico by having her mixed up with Utah. We appealed to the Congress, and we were saved by a speech made by Thos. M. Patterson of Colorado, subsequently senator from Colorado, who carried the day for us. At a recent Trans-Mississippi Congress held in Denver, I sat with ex-Senator Patterson to hear Mr. Prince still proposing resolutions in support of statehood for New Mexico. Twenty years later!] Joseph L. Rawlins, Democratic delegate from Utah, worked valiantly among the Democrats, and he was assisted by the influence of Mr. Franklin S. Richards and John T. Caine and others among their old associates in that party. But, in the very midst of the fight, we were advised that, unless the Republican leaders would let the Enabling Act go through, the Democratic leaders would falter in our advocacy.
I had been urged to go to Washington by the Presidency to do what I might to allay Republican antagonism, and I found that a number of self-appointed lobbyists (who expected political preferment's and other rewards from the Church in the event of statehood) had been using the most amazing arguments in our behalf. For example, they told some of the "financial Senators" that the Church had fourteen million dollars in secret funds with which to help build a railroad to the coast as soon as statehood should be granted. They cited the number of the Church's adherents in all the states and territories of the Pacific Coast and as far east as Iowa and Missouri, and predicted that the gratitude of these people to the Republicans who were helping to free Utah would enable the Republican party to control a balance of political power in the several states. They declared positively that plural marriages and plural marriage living had utterly ceased among the Mormons for all time. And they made such statements with great particularity to Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut, who was too wise a man to credit them.
As soon as I returned to Washington, he summoned me to a private meeting, in his parlor in the Arlington Hotel, and confronted me with one of the Republican lobbyists who had been soliciting his personal favor and his almost controlling influence. "Now, Mr. Cannon," he said, in his dry way, "have the Mormons stopped living with their plural wives? And will there never be another case of plural marriage among them?"
I remembered the lesson of my interview with him at the time of the campaign against the disfranchisement bill, and I answered: "No. Not all the men of the Church have complied fully with the law. So far as I know, all the general authorities of the Church—with two or three exceptions—are fulfilling the covenant they gave; and so far as I can judge there will never be another plural marriage ceremony with the consent or connivance of the leaders of the Church. But human nature is very much the same in Utah as it is in Connecticut. Here and there, no doubt, a man feels that he's under an obligation to keep his covenant with his plural wives in preference to the covenant of his accepted amnesty; and there and here, possibly, in the future, some man will break the law and defy the orders of the Church and take a plural wife. But the leaders of the Church do not countenance either proceeding, and any man who violates the law, in either respect, offends against the revelations of the Church and, I believe, will be dealt with as an apostate. I come direct from the Presidency of the Church, and I am authorized to pledge their word of honor that they will themselves obey the law and do all in their power as men and leaders to bring their people into harmony with the institutions of this country as rapidly as possible."
Senator Platt had slowly unwrapped himself, rising from his chair to his full height of more than six feet, in a lank and alarming indignation. "There," he said, striding up and down the room. "That's it! That's just it. These people have been telling us that you were obeying the law—all of you—in every instance—and would always obey it. And now you come here and admit, openly, that some of you, to whom we have granted amnesty, are breaking your word—and that 'possibly' others, in the future, will do the same thing!"
"Senator," I pleaded, "what confidence could you have in me if I were to tell you the Mormons were so superhuman that in a single day they could eliminate all their human characteristics? I'm asking you to recognize that the tendency imparted to a whole community is more important than any one man's breach of the law. Believe me, if you grant us our statehood, there will never be any lawbreaking sanctioned or protected by the Church leaders, and just as speedily as possible the entire system will be brought into harmony with the institutions of the nation. I'm telling you the truth."
He turned on me to ask, abruptly, how the polygamists had adjusted their family affairs.