Presidential Address: An American Album, 1857 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 2010. Presidential address: An American album, 1857. American Historical Review 115(1): 1-25. Published Version doi:10.1086/ahr.115.1.1 Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:4728139 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Presidential Address An American Album, 1857 LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH SOMETIMES THE BEST WAY to approach a big topic is to focus on a small one. I would like to address a very large topic—conflict over marriage in the nineteenth-century United States—by considering a single object, a quilt made in the Territory of Utah in 1857. The quilt survives today in two parts. According to family tradition, a twelve- year-old boy won it in a raffle in Salt Lake City in 1857, then years later, when his own children were grown, cut it in two for his oldest daughters. In 1996, Carol and Dan Nielson of Salt Lake City inherited one half. Carol was determined to find the other. Through savvy research and a bit of luck, she did. Then she set about iden- tifying the sixty-three women whose signatures—in thread and in ink—are clearly visible on the squares. In 2004 she published the results of her research in The Salt Lake City 14th Ward Album Quilt.1 Her objective was to tell stories meaningful to the descendants of the quilters and to others interested in local and family history. My objectives are different. Building on Carol’s work, I would like to convince my fellow historians that focusing on a single artifact can yield unexpected insights. Like other forms of micro-history, an object-centered inquiry enlarges details, al- lowing us to see connections that might otherwise be invisible. The year 1857 was an important one in history. Specialists might point to the Dred Scott decision in the United States, the Great Mutiny against British rule in India, filibustering in Nic- aragua, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act in England, apocalyptic cattle- killing in South Africa, or the publication in France of Gustave Flaubert’s novel of adultery, Madame Bovary. The quilt focuses attention on a different mix of race, imperialism, insurrection, religion, sex, and the law in a raging public controversy over the practice of polygamy by the Latter-day Saint (Mormon) inhabitants of the territory of Utah. To their antagonists, the Latter-day Saints were not just sexual deviants. They were aliens. In the words of Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, “Under the guise of religion this people has established and seek to maintain and perpetuate, I would like to thank Nancy Cott, Jill Lepore, and Sarah Pearsall for comments on an earlier draft of this essay; Brittany Chapman, David Whittaker, and Ronald Walker for assistance in locating docu- ments; and Carol Nielson for showing me the quilt and answering my many queries about it. 1 Carol Holindrake Nielson, The Salt Lake City 14th Ward Album Quilt, 1857: Stories of the Relief Society Women and Their Quilt (Salt Lake City, 2004), 7–11, 203, 206. Shirley Mumford, who owns the missing segment, is also a descendant of Richard Henry Horne, the boy who won the raffle. 1 2 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich FIGURE 1: Fourteenth Ward Album Quilt. Salt Lake City, Utah, 1857. Courtesy of Dan and Carol Nielson and Shirley Mumford. Photographs by Dan Nielson. (The figures can be viewed in color in the online version of the article at http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ahr.) a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world.”2 Novelists and the new illustrated weeklies took up the chorus, linking Utahns with Turks, Africans, and Indians on both sides of the world.3 Utah leaders responded in kind. Characterizing 2 Justin S. Morrill, “Utah Territory and Its Laws—Polygamy and Its License,” February 23, 1857, U.S. Congress, House, Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 2nd Sess., 284–290, quoted in William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, Okla., 2008), 87. 3 Compare, for example, “The Outbreak in India,” Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, August 1, 1857, 493– 494, with “Scenes in an American Harem,” Harper’s Illustrated Weekly, October 10, 1857, 648–650. See AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 An American Album, 1857 3 federal appointees as “dogs and skunks,” they vowed to resist those who trampled on their constitutional rights. In New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco, Mormon editors and their opponents exchanged charges and countercharges, multiplying claims of oppression on one side and sedition on the other. The conflict escalated until in 1857, President James Buchanan dispatched one-sixth of the U.S. Army to Utah to put down a supposed rebellion.4 Events played out in seemingly random ways. In May, near a rural courthouse in Arkansas, an aggrieved husband gunned down a Mormon apostle who he claimed had seduced his wife. In September, at Mountain Meadows, a lush grazing spot on the Old Spanish Trail through southern Utah, a group of Mormon settlers and their Paiute allies ambushed an emigrant wagon train bound for California and slaugh- tered most of its members. In early October, far to the north in Salt Lake City, sixty-three members of the Fourteenth Ward Female Relief Society won a prize for their “Album Quilt.” At first glance, the quilt appears unrelated to the tumult. In fact, there are both direct and indirect links to public events of that year. Among the quilters were three wives of Parley P. Pratt, the apostle murdered in Arkansas. A more tenuous link runs through the origins of the Female Relief Society to the fateful alliance between Southern Paiutes and Latter-day Saints in the massacre at Mountain Meadows. More significant is the interplay between the seemingly innocuous imagery of the quilt and the coming of the federal army. The quilt does more than connect a particular group of women to a set of sensational events. It takes us beneath the headlines to un- resolved issues about family, faith, marriage, and public authority, issues that mat- tered in 1857 and that matter today. It helps us to see that on both sides of the conflict, the issue was what it meant to be an American. There are obvious differences between the fight over polygamy in the nineteenth century and the fight over same-sex marriage today. But there are also some striking similarities. Both conflicts involved a struggle between local and national authority and between minority rights and majority rule. In 1857, as today, people argued over what was innate and what was chosen, grounding their arguments both in science and in scripture. And in both cases, a stigmatized but assertive minority became the locus for extravagant fears over the survival of the nation. TODAY THE CHURCH of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dissociates itself from po- lygamy, which officially ended in 1890.5 But for more than half a century, it fought also Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 72–76, 111–131; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nine- teenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002), 29–54. 4 Important works relating to the Utah War include, in addition to the documentary edition by MacKinnon cited above, Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, Conn., 1960); Kenneth M. Stampp, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York, 1990); Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (1950; repr., Norman, Okla., 1961); Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley, Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York, 2008); Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman, Okla., 2002); Matthew J. Grow, “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (New Haven, Conn., 2009). 5 For official statements on this issue, see the many entries under “Polygamy” on the official church website, http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2010 4 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich the U.S. government’s attempts to squelch the practice. Although rumors of po- lygamy contributed to the murder of Joseph Smith in Illinois in 1844, the church did not publicly endorse “plural marriage” until 1852, five years after the arrival in Utah. The announcement came in a sermon preached at Brigham Young’s behest by Orson Pratt, a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. Pratt began with a seemingly conventional point, that God instituted marriage in the Garden of Eden and that he commanded Adam and Eve to “multiply and replenish the earth.” But he took that idea of multiplying to unimagined heights, arguing that even in the next life, a man’s posterity would “constitute his glory, his kingdom, and dominion.” He estimated that less than one-fifth of the nations of the earth embraced monogamy, and suggested that those who did showed themselves to be contracted in spirit and in mind. By accepting the new order of marriage, righteous men could inherit the promise God gave to Abraham, that his posterity would be as numberless as the stars in the heavens or the sands of the sea.