Utah Admitted to the Union
Utah was admitted to the Union as the 45th state on January 4, 1896, following a complex history marked by its unique cultural and social dynamics. Initially settled by Indigenous tribes such as the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshones, the region later attracted members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as Mormons, who sought refuge from persecution in the mid-19th century. The Mormons, led by Brigham Young, established their community in the Great Salt Lake area after a challenging migration. Following the U.S. acquisition of the territory through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the Mormons attempted to create a state called Deseret, but this effort was not recognized by Congress.
Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, conflicts arose between the Mormons and federal authorities, particularly over the practice of polygamy, which was a significant aspect of their religious beliefs. Various federal laws aimed at curbing polygamy created legal challenges and tensions that delayed Utah's statehood. In 1890, a pivotal moment occurred when church leaders renounced polygamy, paving the way for statehood. The process culminated in the passing of an enabling act by Congress in 1893, followed by the ratification of Utah's state constitution in 1895, resulting in Utah's formal admission to the Union. This historical trajectory reflects the interplay of cultural, legal, and political factors that shaped Utah's emergence as a state.
Utah Admitted to the Union
Utah Admitted to the Union
On January 4, 1896, Utah became the 45th state to enter the Union. Its settlement by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, unofficially known as the Mormons, contributed greatly to the uniqueness of Utah's history.
Utah was originally settled by the Ute, Paiute, and Shoshone tribes. Before the 19th century, present-day Utah, like most of the southwestern United States, was claimed by Spain. The incomplete and often vague records left by Spanish explorers indicate that a few men from Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's expedition may have crossed southern Utah in 1540. It was only in 1776, however, that the Spanish missionaries Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Dominguez made the first large-scale explorations. A section of their route later became part of the Old Spanish Trail, which stretched from Santa Fe in present New Mexico to Monterey in Alta, California.
Since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark passed north of Utah during their famous expedition of 1804–1806, the first Americans to enter Utah probably were four members of the 1811–1812 overland expedition sponsored by John Jacob Astor. By the early 1820s, fur traders, lured by reports of rich beaver streams, had found their way over the rugged terrain, and they rapidly depleted the fur supply between 1824 and 1830. Starting in the 1840s, California-bound emigrant trains made their way across the great salt desert. In 1846, the Donner party struggled through the mountains east of the Great Salt Lake and plodded across the desert only to fall victim to heavy snows and starvation farther west. Shortly before 1847, Miles Goodyear set up the first trading post, Fort Buenaventura, at the site of present-day Ogden, thus becoming Utah's first settler.
Farther east, meanwhile, the Mormons were suffering the persecution that had already driven them from New York State to the Midwest. After the murder of their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, at Nauvoo, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, the Mormons turned to Brigham Young, and under his leadership they sought refuge far beyond the country's western frontier. In 1847, after a harrowing overland trek, they arrived in the parched and barren basin of the Great Salt Lake, where they laid out their new city. As the Latter-Day Saints assembled, and emigrants from this country and abroad swelled their ranks, Mormon communities spread along the western slopes of the Wasatch Range, where irrigation techniques helped to support the rapid growth in population.
Utah was ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which ended the Mexican War. As spokesman for the approximately 11,000 Mormons who had settled in and near Salt Lake City by 1849, Brigham Young held a convention to organize the Latter-Day Saints' aggressive theocracy into a state under the name of Deseret. He claimed a far-flung empire, including the present states of Utah and Nevada and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Petitioning Congress for statehood, Young established a provisional government on March 10, 1849, and became governor in the first election.
The petition for statehood failed, however, and Deseret as originally conceived was short-lived. Congress even refused to accept its name. The bill setting up the geographically smaller Territory of Utah was signed by President Millard Fillmore on September 9, 1850. The newly established territory consisted of what is now Utah, western Colorado, most of Nevada, and a slice of Wyoming. Brigham Young was appointed territorial governor. The first official census in 1850 listed 11,380 persons. Almost immediately the Mormons were in conflict with the federal authorities, who were suspicious of Mormon ways and the autocratic rule of Brigham Young. In the summer of 1857, President James Buchanan ordered army troops, commanded by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, to proceed to the Utah Territory and occupy Salt Lake City. The Mormons organized a guerrilla force of militiamen that successfully resisted the federal troops, and when the Civil War broke out the Lincoln administration quietly decided to leave the Mormons alone.
After the Civil War, America's westward expansion resumed and the issue of Utah's status in general and statehood in particular resurfaced. Brigham Young's final years before his death on August 29, 1877, were marked by two struggles: the attempt to preserve Mormon polygamy and the attempt to achieve statehood for Utah. The two were closely connected, for much of the outside opposition to the Mormons came as a consequence of polygamy, and it was this very vocal opposition that prevented the government from admitting Utah to the Union with Brigham as its governor.
The Mormon practice of polygamy derived from a divine revelation sanctioning the practice that the prophet Joseph Smith claimed to have received on July 12, 1843. Although there was little concealment of the practice either in Nauvoo, Illinois, or later on in Utah, Smith's controversial revelation was not officially proclaimed until August 1852, when Brigham Young judged the community strong enough and sufficiently isolated to prevent serious consequences. But reformers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe soon linked polygamy with slavery as those “twin relics of barbarism” that must be swept from the face of the earth. After Young's death in 1877, the Reverend De Witt Talmage of Brooklyn, New York, even paused in the midst of a church service to offer a suggestion to the national government: “Now, my friends, now at the death of the Mormon chieftain, is the time for the United States government to strike.…Give Phil Sheridan enough troops, and he will teach all Utah that 40 wives is 39 too many.”
However, polygamy raised difficult legal problems for those legislators who desired its prohibition. The Constitution does not prevent a man from having as many wives as he wants (or, in fact, a woman from having as many husbands as she wants, although that twist to polygamy was not part of Joseph Smith's revelation). Moreover, legislation against polygamy might conceivably be interpreted as an infringement upon the constitutional guarantees of religious liberty.
Nevertheless, antipolygamy laws were passed: The first, in 1862, was later supplemented in 1882 and 1887. Under these statutes not only was polygamy forbidden, but the Mormon church was disincorporated and much of its property temporarily confiscated. Vigorous prosecution was carried on in Utah, where polygamists caught in surprise raids were heavily fined and given prison sentences. Many frustrated the investigators by seeking refuge in the winding foothills of the territory or by making two-family houses out of single dwellings by means of camouflage twin-entrance doors. The elderly John Taylor, who had succeeded Brigham Young as president of the church, went into hiding in 1884 and directed church affairs from seclusion until his death in 1887.
On September 25, 1890, following a Supreme Court decision affirming the constitutionality of the antipolygamy laws, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Wilford Woodruff, issued a statement known as The Manifesto. It was not a revelation, or even an explicit retraction of the Mormons' belief in plural marriage, but merely a declaration of expediency, which read in part:
To Whom It May Concern: Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of last resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside, to have them do likewise.
A general church conference held in October supported this move and laid the ban of excommunication on persons continuing to practice polygamy. On January 4, 1893, President Benjamin Harrison granted amnesty to all husbands who repudiated their extra wives and to all polygamists who had married before November 1, 1890.
The renunciation of polygamy cleared the way for Utah's statehood, although by the 1890s the once-vast Territory of Utah had been whittled down by the establishment of the territories of Nevada and Colorado in 1861 and Wyoming in 1868. Congress passed the enabling act in 1893; the state constitution was framed and approved in 1895; and Utah entered the Union on January 4, 1896.