Journal of Arizona History

A burst of new scholarship on the West in the era of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction has unsettled familiar North-South narratives about race, freedom, citizenship, and federal power in the second half of the nineteenth century. These works follow the lead of western historian Elliott West, who theorized in 2003 that the West and the South were bound together in a common process of American state-building that he dubbed "Greater Reconstruction." West's conception of Greater Reconstruction suggested parallels between the newly powerful federal government's efforts to remake the former Confederacy, and to incorporate former slaves into free labor capitalism, with contemporary campaigns to subdue and assimilate western people and lands into the nation. West's own scholarship has primarily focused on the conquest and forced assimilation of Native people. He and other western historians have, however, suggested that the reconstruction of American Indians might be fruitfully compared with similar processes of violent incorporation in the West aimed at consolidating federal power. These include the suppression of Mexican nationalists in the southwestern borderlands, the persecution of Chinese immigrants, and efforts to control Mormon dissidents in Utah. While western historians have tackled the first two subjects, little has been written about Mormon Utah's place in Greater Reconstruction. Reconstruction and Mormon America is a much-needed corrective to the gap in the literature on this important topic.

This edited volume, the outgrowth of a seminar at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, proceeds in three main sections. The first examines the decades leading up to the federal confrontation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). Essays by Angela Pulley Hudson, Christine Talbot, and Patrick Q. Mason tackle the relationship between Mormons and Native people, national discourses surrounding plural marriage, and violence perpetrated by and against LDS members. The second section carries the story of Mormon Utah through Reconstruction and features articles [End Page 698] by Brent M. Rogers, Brett D. Dowdle, and Rachel St. John that assess, and reassess, the forced incorporation of Mormon Utah into the political, cultural, and religious mainstream of the United States. A thought-provoking final section explores the memory of nineteenth-century Mormon persecution among the LDS faithful. Authors Clyde A. Milner II, Eric A. Eliason, and Jared Farmer all seek to explain why Mormons never developed a regional mythology of resistance akin to the "Lost Cause" of the U.S. South.

Two key tensions emerge in the volume. The first deals with the racialization of Mormons and whether their subjugation by the U.S. federal government was actually comparable to that of nonwhite westerners (especially Native Americans). The essays by Rogers and Dowdle acknowledge that Mormons' whiteness created important differences between their experiences and those of western people racialized as nonwhite. At the same time, the authors suggest that Mormons experienced state repression and forced assimilation similar to that of U.S. racial minorities. Dowdle, for instance, argues that non-Mormons regarded Mormons as an "uncivilized and un-American community, which was 'beyond the pale of human sympathy.'" Mormons shared this status with "other minorities such as indigenous Natives, Chinese immigrants, and Hispanic Catholics" (p. 174). Other essays challenge these comparisons. Angela Pulley Hudson's "There is No Mormon Trail of Tears," the volume's sharpest and most provocative article, argues that Mormons' persecution, westward exodus, and suppression by the federal government had no substantive similarities with the treatment of Native Americans. Nineteenth-century Mormons emphasized their own whiteness and civilization, and they avidly celebrated their participation in the U.S. project of dispossessing American Indians in the West. Unlike Native people, Mormons could invoke a shared white identity, and a shared participation in settler colonialism, to shake off their "outsider" status and claim inclusion in the American nation-state. Similarly, the volume's final chapters suggest that a "Lost Cause" mythology never took root in Utah because, in the words of Jared Farmer, "the vocabulary and values of pioneering provided a racial common cause" between white Mormons and white non-Mormons (p. 236). Mormons' overwhelming embrace of whiteness, and their claims to "pioneer" status as conquerors of the West, casts doubt on interpretations of western Reconstruction that equate their experiences with those of persecuted racial groups.

The other central tension in the volume is whether "Greater Reconstruction" is actually a useful framework for understanding the transformation of the late-nineteenth-century West or the United States [End Page 699] as a whole. Rachel St. John, for instance, makes the case for "containing Reconstruction" and limiting the term to the former Confederate states in the post-emancipation era. She contends that "Reconstruction" is simply too narrow a concept for understanding the decades-long struggle over federal authority, citizenship, race, and free labor that encompassed North, South, and West. "Greater Reconstruction" also forces the West into a conceptual framework originally developed to explain southern history. This may preclude studying the West, along with its distinctive processes and problems, on its own terms. In a brief "interlude" piece introducing the second section of the book, Cathleen Cahill and Crystal N. Feimster acknowledge the benefits of studying southern and western Reconstruction in tandem. At the same time, they remind western historians of W. E. B. DuBois's insight that working-class Black people were critical actors in the development of Reconstruction civil rights legislation and federal enforcement policy. They warn against conceptions of Greater Reconstruction that unmoor the post–Civil War period from African American history and the end of slavery in the U.S. South.

The lack of a clear consensus on these critical questions is a strength, rather than a weakness, of this volume. Co-editors Milner and Cannon clearly encouraged authors to put their pieces in conversation with each other and to explicitly address their interpretative disagreements. The result is an exceptionally coherent and generative collection of essays. It continues the debate over the utility and meaning of "Greater Reconstruction" that will advance the scholarly discussion of the West's place in struggles over federal authority, state-building, and citizenship in the nineteenth century.