Southern Violence, Mormon Identity, and American Reunion

Although the southern United States housed only a tiny fraction of Mormon membership in the late nineteenth century, it provided a disproportionately significant role in shaping the identity of the majority who lived in the Mormon heartland in the West.  Most historical narratives of the anti-polygamy crusade of the 1870s and 1880s focus on “the Raid” in Utah or the political and legal maneuvering in Washington, D.C.  But shifting our attention away from these narrative centers to the southern periphery illuminates additional aspects of the conflict between Mormonism and the nation.  The pervasive extralegal violence inflicted upon Mormon missionaries, converts, and sympathizers in the South solidified the persecution mentality that shaped Mormonism’s often-antagonistic relationship to the nation, to other faiths, and to its own dissenters.  The distinctly violent approach that many southerners adopted in combating Mormonism offered a valuable rhetorical tool for Mormons seeking to reinforce a powerful oppositional identity that originated in the church’s early years and continued to define and sustain the Latter-day Saints through the polygamy era.

            Focusing our attention on the South also reveals a previously overlooked aspect of the anti-polygamy movement’s historical significance.  Southern Democrats had opposed anti-polygamy legislation in the 1850s and even 1870s, fearful of the precedent it would create for federal intervention in their own region.  In time, however, moral outrage trumped political and sectional hatreds, as southerners came to embrace the anti-polygamy policies of a succession of mostly Republican presidents.  In this way, anti-Mormonism provided an important, and early, set of bonds that helped reforge national unity in the years immediately following Reconstruction.  Southerners embraced the imposition of coercive federal power on domestic arrangements in Utah, thus representing a modest but significant step in reconciling the former Confederacy with the newly expanded power of the federal government.