Professor Peter Coviello

And of course, what the Mormons want is what they will eventually get once they renounce polygamy at the end of the century, which is the protected if limited sovereignty of statehood.

Because of course, statehood grants you all kinds of sovereign powers, as we know.

And the Civil War had litigated in blood what exactly the extent of those sovereign powers were.

They don't have that.

What they have is territory.

which is much, much more disputed.

Though, of course, what the Mormons have going for them is they're many thousands of miles away, East Coast and the outposts of the federal government.

And so that allows Brigham to maneuver rather more widely than he would have if he was in, say, Pennsylvania or Ohio.

And the detractors of the Mormons call what's being created there a theocratic state or a theodemocracy.

The Mormons think that they are practicing what on the East Coast they like to call religious freedom.

Of course, there's a lot of contestation over what gets to count as religion then as now.

And the Mormons on polygamy and on the way that polygamy made them like they were called all sorts of things in 1930.

Mohammedans was a very favorite one.

They were always being accused of being secretly Indian, fomenting rebellions with the Indians, right?

So they understand themselves to be in possession of religious freedom.

Right.

And they understand polygamy to be a part of that religious freedom.

The federal government does not understand it that way.

These are some of the interior tensions that are really roiling across the 1850s, which is, as you say, already a semi-apocalyptic time because of the fight about slavery that is brewing and becoming more and more apocalyptic.

He does.