Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln’s place in the narrative is defined by a political reversal: he initially offered Brigham Young a promise of mutual noninterference, but his administration later restored federal troops to Utah and enacted a law targeting plural marriage. The episode presents Lincoln not as a biographical subject in his own right, but as a president whose decisions tested the limits of the Mormon leadership’s claim to govern its own territory.

A promise of noninterference

When Lincoln took office, Brigham Young had reason to hope that the new president would leave the Saints alone. Lincoln told a Mormon emissary, “You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.” The assurance suited a community that regarded federal intervention as a threat to its religious and political independence. It also reflected a moment when national attention was turning toward the approaching conflict between North and South.

The departure of federal troops from Utah to reinforce Union forces fighting the Confederacy initially seemed to confirm Young’s hopes. He welcomed their withdrawal, imagining that the country’s internal conflict might consume the government’s capacity to interfere in Deseret. The book sets this expectation against the wider Mormon belief that the Gentile nation was moving toward self-destruction, leaving the Saints secure in their western home. Lincoln’s promise, however, did not amount to a surrender of federal authority; the temporary military withdrawal was driven by the war, not by a resolution of the underlying dispute.

Federal authority returns to Utah

Young’s confidence proved short-lived. Sixteen months after Union forces left Utah, Lincoln replaced them with a regiment of California infantry to ensure federal control of the territory. The troops’ return made the limits of the earlier assurance plain: the government would not simply abandon its claim to authority there. According to the account, some of the soldiers later kept their guns trained on Young’s home, a striking indication of how closely federal officials watched the possibility of resistance.

This confrontation involved more than military presence. Young’s government rested on a competing understanding of law and jurisdiction. Mormon leaders held that God’s law took precedence over human law, while Utah’s Mormon-dominated territorial legislature had expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Young controlled. Federal officials saw this arrangement as an evasion of federal power; the Saints treated outside interference as an assault on religious self-government. Lincoln’s decision to return troops therefore belongs to a larger contest over who could govern Utah, not merely to a change in military deployment.

The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act

In 1862 Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, a measure drafted to punish and prevent plural marriage in the United States territories and to invalidate certain acts of Utah’s territorial legislature. Its passage brought federal policy directly into conflict with a practice Mormon leaders defended as religiously protected. Young rejected the idea that federal law could settle the matter, insisting that divine law outranked laws made by outsiders. Lincoln’s signature thus gave the federal government’s opposition a concrete legal form, even as Young continued to claim a separate religious jurisdiction.

The book describes the act as evidence that Lincoln intended to be at least as tough on the Mormons as the presidents before him. Young responded angrily, condemning Lincoln and his supporters. The contrast is consequential: the president’s reported promise of reciprocal restraint had not prevented his administration from asserting federal authority over a central Mormon institution. The narrative does not portray the law as ending the dispute; rather, it shows the law sharpening a conflict in which the parties appealed to different sources of legitimacy.

The end of the wartime opening

Young had expected the Civil War to leave the United States too divided to press its claims in Utah. In April 1865, the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox ended that hope. The Union survived intact and emerged stronger, and Young had to acknowledge that the national government would become increasingly involved in the affairs of Deseret. Lincoln’s presidency is therefore linked to two stages in the same change: first, the war created a temporary opening that Young welcomed; then the return of federal troops and the anti-bigamy law demonstrated that the opening would not last.

The episode’s irony lies in the gap between Lincoln’s concise assurance and the continuing reach of federal power. His words offered a condition, not an unconditional guarantee: if Young left the government alone, the government would leave him alone. Yet the administration’s military and legislative actions made clear that the national government still claimed jurisdiction over Utah. The narrative uses this tension to illuminate the broader struggle between the Mormon project of local religious rule and the authority of the United States.