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The State of Deseret

Dean L. May

The earliest Anglo-American settlers of the Great Basin, like those of Oregon and California, took action to establish a provisional government while waiting for the U.S. Congress to act. The region became U.S. territory on February 2, 1848, under terms of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war between Mexico and the United States. In December, a body of Mormon leaders called the Council of Fifty prepared a petition to the U.S. Congress for the establishment of a territorial government. They then proceeded to organize a civil government, the populace voting on March 12 to form the state of Deseret, and approving as principal officers Brigham Young, governor; Willard Richards, secretary; Heber C. Kimball, chief justice of the Supreme Court; Newel K. Whitney and John Taylor, associate justices; and local Judges that included bishops of each of the 19 wards of Salt Lake City. The legislature, or General Assembly, met on July 2, chose Almon W. Babbitt to be delegate to the U.S. Congress, and then decided to petition Congress for statehood rather than territorial status.

The proposed state was to be called Deseret, a Book of Mormon word meaning "honeybee," symbolizing both industry and the cooperative, communal organization of their society. The constitution provided for a bicameral legislature and for executive and judicial branches of government. It affirmed religious freedom and separation of church and state. However, with the great majority of the population Mormon, Church leaders--especially members of the Council of Fifty--were the sole candidates for office. Mormons at the time believed that the state of Deseret was to be the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, would supersede all other civil authority, and should appropriately be under ecclesiastical control.

The petition proposed vast boundaries, some 490,000 square miles, extending from the Colorado Rockies to the Sierras and from the Oregon Country to the Gila River, with a southern salient stretching west to include the Pacific coast from Los Angeles to San Diego. Such extensive claims were justified by the service of Mormons in the Mexican War, the leaders maintaining in a petition to Congress that "we have done more by our arms and influence than any other equal number of citizens to obtain and secure this country to the government of the United States."

Thomas L. Kane, a friend and political adviser to the Mormons, had urged them to press for statehood rather than territorial status, but the petition became bogged down in high-level political dealing to determine the status of slavery in the territory conquered from Mexico. The wrangling was resolved in the Compromise of 1850, which denied statehood, but on September 9, 1850, created a considerably pruned-back, though still enormous, territory to be named Utah, after the most powerful of the resident Indian tribes, the Utes. A central provision of the compromise was popular sovereignty--that Congress would take no position on the status of slavery in Utah, leaving the matter ultimately to the local citizenry.