"Though I may not be Governor here, my power will not be diminished. No man they can send here will have much influence with this community, unless he be the man of their choice. Let them send whom they will, it does not diminish my influence one particle."
The consequences of the Expedition, therefore, have not corresponded to the original expectation of its projectors. So far as the political condition of the Territory is concerned, the result, filtered down, amounts simply to a demonstration of the impolicy of applying the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty as a rule for its government. The administration of President Polk was an epoch in the history of the continent. By the annexation of Texas a system of territorial aggrandizement was inaugurated; and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which California, Utah, and New Mexico were acquired, was a legitimate result. Every child knows that the tendency is toward the acquisition of all North America. But the statesmen who originated a policy so grand did not stop to establish a system of Territorial government correspondent to its necessities. The character of such a Territorial policy is now the principal subject upon which the great parties of the nation are divided; and its development will constitute the chief political achievement of the generation. On one side, it is proposed to leave each community to work out its own destiny, trusting to Providence for the result. On the other, it is contended, that the only safe doctrine is, that supreme authority over the Territories resides in Congress, which it is its duty to assign to such hands and in such degrees as it may deem expedient, with a view to create homogeneous States; that the same influences which moulded Minnesota into a State homogeneous to Massachusetts might operate on Cuba, or Sonora and Chihuahua, without avail; and that to various districts the various methods should be applied which a father would employ to secure the obedience and welfare of his children.
At the very outset, the Territory of Utah now presents itself as a subject for the application of the one system or the other. To all intents and purposes, the Mormons are proved to be a people more foreign to the population of the States than the inhabitants of Cuba or Mexico. Alien in great part by birth, and entirely alien in religion, there never can occur in the history of the country an instance of a community harder to govern, with a view to adapt it to harmonious association with the States on the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is undeniably demonstrated that it is unsafe to trust it to administer a government in accordance with republican ideas; for it acknowledges a higher law than even the human conscience, in the will of a person whom it professes to believe a vicegerent of Divinity, and in obedience to whom perjury, robbery, incest, and even murder, may be justifiable,—for his commands are those of Heaven. It is obvious that it is fruitless to anticipate fair dealing from a people professing such doctrines; and the result has shown, that, in transactions with Mormons, even under oath, no one who does not acknowledge a standard of religious belief similar to their own can count upon justice any farther than they may think it politic to accord it. The army is, indeed, placed in a position to suppress instantaneously another forcible outbreak; but everybody is aware that there are means of annulling the operation of law quite as effectually as by an uprising in arms. Recent proceedings in the courts of the extreme Southern States have caused this fact to be keenly appreciated. The pirates who sailed the slavers "Echo" and "Wanderer" yet remain to be punished. So far as South Carolina and Georgia are concerned, the law declaring the slave-trade piracy is a dead letter; and the sentiment which prevails toward it in Charleston and Savannah is an imperfect index of that which is manifested at Salt Lake City toward all national authority.
The legislation of Utah has been conducted with a view to precisely the condition of affairs which now exists, and the Territorial statute-book shows that the transfer of executive power from Brigham Young had long been anticipated. It is impracticable to adduce, in this place, proof of the fact in extenso; but a brief enumeration of some of the principal statutes will indicate the character of the entire code. An act exists incorporating the Mormon Church with power to hold property, both real and personal, to an indefinite extent, exempt from taxation, coupled with authority to establish laws and criteria for its safety, government, comfort, and control, and for the punishment of all offences relating to fellowship, according to its covenants. By this act the Church is invested with absolute and perpetual sovereignty. Under it the whole system of polygamy is conducted, for plural marriages are sanctioned by the covenants; the Danite organization is authorized, for it is instituted for the comfort and control of the Church, and the punishment of offences relative to fellowship; the burden of the taxes is thrown in a yearly increasing ratio upon Gentiles, for the Church property exempted from taxation amounts already to several millions of dollars, and increases every day; and the treasonable rites of the Endowment are celebrated, and the inferior members of the Church tithed and pillaged, for the benefit of the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles. Acts also exist legalizing negro and Indian slavery. There are within the Territory at the present time not more than fifty or sixty negroes, but there are several hundred Indians, held in servitude. These are mostly Pyides, into whose country some of the Utah bands make periodical forays, capturing their young women and children, whom they sell to the Navajoes in New Mexico, as well as to the Mormons. There are other acts, which rob the United States judges of their jurisdiction, civil, criminal, and in equity, and confer it on the Probate Courts; which forbid the citation of any reports, even those of the Supreme Court of the United States, during any trial; which regulate the descent of property so as to include the issue of polygamic marriages among the legal heirs; which withdraw from exemption from attachment the entire property of persons suspected of an intention to leave the Territory; which authorize the invasion of domiciles for purposes of search, upon the simple order of any judicial officer; which legalize the rendition of verdicts in civil cases upon the concurrence of two-thirds of the jurors; which command attorneys to present in court, under penalty of fine and imprisonment, in all cases, every fact of which they are cognizant, "whether calculated to make against their clients or not"; which restrict the institution of proceedings against adulterers to the husband or the wife of one of the guilty parties; which levy duties on all goods imported into the Territory for sale; which abolish the freedom of the ballot-box, by providing that each vote shall be numbered, and a record kept of the names of the electors with the numbers attached, which, together with the ballots, shall be preserved for reference; and which empower the county courts to impose taxes to an indefinite amount on whomsoever they may please, for the erection of fortifications within their respective jurisdictions. But the most extraordinary and unconstitutional series of acts—no less than sixty in number—exists with regard to the primary disposal of the soil, with which the Territorial legislature is expressly forbidden by the Organic Act to interfere. These pretend to confer upon Church dignitaries, and especially on Brigham Young and his family, tracts of land probably amounting in the aggregate to more than ten thousand square miles, as well as the exclusive right to establish bridges and ferries over the principal rivers in the Territory,—together with the exclusive use of those streams flowing down from the Wahsatch Mountains which are most valuable for irrigating and manufacturing purposes. The virtual control of the settlement of the eastern portion of Utah is thus vested in the Church; for these grants include almost all the lands which are immediately valuable for occupation. After a glance at a list of them, it is not hard to understand the causes of the great disparity in the distribution of wealth among the Mormons. They have been so allotted as to benefit a very few at the expense of the whole people; and they are protected by a terrorism which no one dares to confront in order to challenge their validity. The majority of the population are ignorant of their rights,—and too pusillanimous to maintain them against the hierarchy, if they were not. They therefore contribute to its coffers not merely their tithing, but heavy exactions also for grazing their cattle on pastures to which they themselves have just as much title as the nominal proprietors, and for grinding their grain and purchasing their lumber at mills on streams which are of right common to all the settlers on their banks.
From the Utah Expedition, then, it has become patent to the world, if it is not to ourselves, that the Mormons are unwilling to administer a republican form of government, if not incapable of doing so. The author of the letter recently addressed by "A Man of the Latin Race" to the Emperor Napoleon, on the subject of French influence in America, comments especially upon this fact as symptomatic of the disintegration of this republic; and allusion is made to it in every other foreign review of our political condition. It is obviously inconsistent with our national dignity that a remedy should not be immediately applied; but when we seek for such, only two courses of action are discernible, in the maze of political quibbles and constitutional scruples that at once suggest themselves. One is, to repeal the Organic Act and place the Territory under military control; the other is, to buy the Mormons out of Utah, offering them a reasonable compensation for the improvements they have made there, as also transportation to whatever foreign region they may select for a future abode.
The embarrassments which might result from the adoption of the former course are obvious. It would be attended with immense expense, and would embitter the Mormons still more against the National Government; and it would also deter Gentiles from emigrating to a region where three thousand Federal bayonets would constitute the sole guaranty of the security of their persons and property.
The other course is not only practicable, but humane and expedient. During his whole career, Brigham Young committed no greater mistake than when he settled in Utah a community whose recruits are almost without exception drawn from foreign lands; for, since the removal from Illinois, every attempt to propagate Mormonism in the American States has been a failure. Every avenue of communication with Utah is necessarily obstructed. No railroad penetrates to within eleven hundred miles of Salt Lake Valley. There is no watercourse within four hundred miles, on which navigation is practicable. Neither the Columbia nor the Colorado empties into seas bordered by nations from which the Mormons derive accessions; and the length of a voyage up the Mississippi, Missouri, and Yellowstone forbids any expectation that their channels will ever become a pathway to the centre of the continent. The road to Utah must always lead overland, and travel upon it is the more expensive from the fact that no great passenger-transportation companies exist at either of the termini. Each family of emigrants must provide its own outfit of provisions, wagons, and oxen, or mules. Through the agency of what is called the Perpetual Emigration Fund of the Church, the capital of which amounts to several millions of dollars,—which was instituted professedly to befriend, but really to fleece the foreign converts,—few Englishmen arrive at Salt Lake City without having exhausted their own means and incurred an amount of debt which it requires the labor of many years to discharge. The physical sufferings of the journey, also, are severe and often fatal. The bleak cemetery at Salt Lake City contains but a small proportion of the Mormon dead. Along the thousand miles of road from the Missouri River to the Great Lake, there stand, thicker than milestones, memorials of those who failed on the way. A rough board, a pile of stones, a grave ransacked by wolves, crown many a swell of the bottom-lands along the Platte; and across the broad belt of mountains there is no spot so desolate as to be unmarked by one of these monuments of the march of Mormonism.
As these difficulties of transit subside under the surge of population toward the new State of Oregon, or to the gold-diggings on the head-waters of the South Fork of the Platte, an element must permeate Utah which would be fatal to the supremacy of the Church. That depends, as has been so often repeated, upon isolation. Already the presence of the army with its crowd of unruly dependents has begun to disturb it. In the trail of the troops, like sparks shed from a rocket, a legion of mail-stations and trading-posts have sprung up, which materially facilitate communication with the East. A horseman, starting now from Fort Leavenworth, with a good animal, can ride to Salt Lake City, sleeping under cover every night; while in July, 1857, when the army commenced its march from the frontier, there were stretches of more than three hundred miles without a single white inhabitant. On the west, under the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, there is a settlement of several thousand Gentiles in Carson Valley, who, though nominally under the same Territorial government with the Mormons, have no real connection with them, politically, socially, or commercially, and are petitioning Congress for a Territorial organisation of their own. A telegraphic wire has already wound its way over the sierra among them, and will soon palpitate through Salt Lake City in its progress toward the Atlantic.
Brigham Young perceives this inevitable advance of Christian civilization toward his stronghold, as clearly as the most unprejudiced spectator. No one is better aware than himself, that, if the great industrial conception of the age, the Pacific Railroad, shall ever begin to be realized, the first shovelful of dirt thrown on its embankments will be the commencement of the grave of his religion and authority. Among the projects with which his brain is busy is that of yet another exodus; and it must be undertaken speedily, if at all,—for a generation is growing up in the Church with an attachment for the land in which it was reared. The pioneers of the faith, who were buffeted from Ohio to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois, and from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains, are dwindling every year. Their migrations have been so various, that no local sentiment would influence them against another removal. Such a sentiment, if it exists at all among them, is not for Utah, but for Missouri, where they believe that the capital will be founded of that kingdom in which the Church in the progress of ages will unite the world. They dropped upon the shores of the Salt Lake in 1847, like birds spent upon the wing, only because they could not fly farther.
Two regions have been suggested for the ultimate resort of the Mormons: one, the Mosquito Coast in Central America; the other, the Island of Papua or New Guinea, among the East Indies. During the winter, while the army lay encamped at Fort Bridger, Colonel Kinney, the colonizing adventurer, endeavored to communicate from the East to Brigham Young an offer to sell to the Church several millions of acres of land on the Mosquito Coast, of which he purports to be the proprietor. His agent, however, reached no farther than Green River. But during the spring of 1858, other agents, dispatched from California, were more successful in reaching Salt Lake Valley. They were hospitably received by the Mormons, but Young declined to enter into the negotiation. The other scheme—that for an emigration to Papua—originated at Washington during the same winter. It was eagerly seized upon by Captain Walter Gibson, the same who was once imprisoned by the Dutch in Java. He put himself into communication on the subject with Mr. Bernhisel, the Mormon delegate to Congress, who appeared to regard the plan with favor. After it was developed, as a step preliminary to transmitting it to Utah for consideration, Mr. Bernhisel waited upon the President of the United States in order to ascertain whether the cooperation of the National Government in the undertaking could be expected. The reply of Mr. Buchanan was fatal to the project, which he discountenanced as a vague and wild dream.