Benjamin E. Park

A hard confession from someone who specializes in the early republic and antebellum periods: the 1850s is my favorite decade to teach in the American survey. It always feels like my lectures are a sprint throughout he semester, given the nature of the course, but it still seems to pick up speed once we hit the Compromise of 1850, and we don’t get another breather until The corrupt bargain of 1877. (I can never skimp on Reconstruction, especially given today’s circumstances.) I say this is a hard confession because my own research ends in the 1840s, so you’d think I’d prefer the weeks that precede these lectures. But there’s something about the 1850s that really captures me.

Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Brent Rogers’s new book, helped me finally put my finger on what it is about the decade that grabs my attention: the sheer audacity of imperial desires, the violent results of local implementation, and the juxtaposition of sophisticated political theories and parochial hypocrisies dominated the American landscape. These tensions had been around since the beginning, of course, but they were brought to the foreground as soon as the nation finally possessed a continent-wide empire. It is ironically tragic, of course, that the fulfillment of that long-held dream was what cemented the Union’s (temporary) dissolution.

Utah Territory in 1850 was part of a large swath of land theoretically governed by the federal government. In reality, though, the area west of the organized states was an arena for racial, political, and provincial squabbles. This was no small region under the careful thumb of Uncle Sam: the square mileage of the territories outnumbered that of states. America was finally an empire, but one that was spread razer-thin. Determining how to colonize, organize, and integrate this region was of national significance. Historians of early Utah have often emphasized the tense relations between LDS leaders and national politicians, but few have adequately contextualized the episode within this much broader question of federal governance in an era of over-expansion. Rogers’s book exhaustively overviews the political interplay between the Mormon people, with their theocratic ideas and people spread across the Rocky Mountain region, and the Washington DC leaders, who tried to corral their renegade zealots even as they simultaneously attempted to hold their nation together.

Central to these 1850s debates was the idea of popular sovereignty. Most know the concept from its most prominent proponent, the “little giant” Stephen A Douglas. Basically, it was the belief that these western territories should be able to determine their own fate rather than rely on federal intervention. The issue most relevant to this concept, of course, was slavery. How should the nation decide which new states carved from the expansive western area would be slave or free? Douglas proclaimed that the federal government had no business solving this question at all. He worked to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which overturned previous congressional ruling regarding the fate of slavery in those territories. Students in my survey courses become well aware of Douglas’s popular sovereignty philosophy when we dissect his famous debates with Abraham Lincoln. I’m sure this is quite common in classrooms throughout the nation.

So what does Mormonism have to do with popular sovereignty? Rogers argues that, like Kansas, Utah “emerged as a key battleground and hotbed of antebellum debate over popular sovereignty” (3). If western territories should be granted the autonomy to govern themselves, what about the Mormons? Federal dealings with Utah proved that popular sovereignty was not a monolithic one-size-fits-all philosophy. The strength of Unpopular Sovereignty is found in Rogers’s exhaustive overview of competing ideas concerning democratic governance in the West. The federal government was surprisingly adaptive. At the heart of the issue was a question of civilization: Who could be trusted to govern themselves? Southern slaveholders? Mormon polygamists? Native tribes? These three groups, along with others, were found on a spectrum of political philosophies that were never full comprehensive nor coherent.

I wish Rogers would have spent a bit more time on the racialization of popular sovereignty and democratic governance. He does have a chapter on the relationship between the Mormons and their Indian neighbors, both the real connections as those imagined in Washington, but he mostly dealt with them as political bodies. Popular sovereignty, I’d argue, was built upon ethnic conceptions of belonging and nationhood. Paul Reeve’s recent book highlights this, but the political dimensions of this angle should still be unpacked. The place of racial minorities was a crucial topic for the American nation at the time, especially with the newly-acquired land from Mexico, and Mormons played into that debate as well. Whiteness and American westward imperialism still needs more work. That’s likely too much to ask for an already hefty tome that has dug so deeply into other topics, however.

Rogers makes several key historiographic interventions, both in political and Mormon spheres. His work on the plurality of popular sovereignty adds to a lively discussion on what was previously a staid topic. His comparative work on Kansas and Utah also demonstrates the fraught nature of democratic experiments in the 1850, proving that popular sovereignty was contested even within the Democratic Party. And his argument that the Utah War in 1857-58 set the stage for nation schism (Southerners saw it as a challenge to local sovereignty, and Republicans used it as evidence for the Democrats’ hypocrisy) contributes an intriguing nuance to a crowded narrative. Historians of American politics will learn a lot about the vagaries of democratic discourse, and teachers should have new material to share in the classroom.

And what about the Mormon historiographic sphere? For starters, Rogers demonstrates one way to overcome the “donut hole” problem of western history. (That traditional narratives of the American West circle around Utah but never really integrate the state and its Mormon residents.) The Mormon clashes with federal government in the 1850s was not completely unique, but rather part of a much larger moment of imperial expansion and related to questions concerning federal governance. And Rogers’s focus on the multiplicity of opinions on either side of the divide—neither the Mormons or their opponents were ever notably consistent—breaks down the tired bifurcated narrative of saints vs. gentiles. His is a model of integration and nuance.

The book became quite long and meticulous at times—perhaps like this review?—but overall I found it quite compelling. It interweaves published and private writing, not to mention useful maps, into a grand story of federal conflict. I hope it is a sign of more scholarship that better situates Mormonsim into America’s quixotic history of democracy.

The Boston Massacre has loomed large in America’s historical memory. Taking place five years before the battles at Lexington and Concord, the episode featured British soldiers firing into a gathering of unarmed colonists. Four died on the scene, and another succumbed to mortal wounds a few days later. The moment and its martyrs were immortalized in a famous Paul Revere illustration that same year:

But the story has complex legacies. Was this a significant step on the way to rebellion and independence, or was it the result of an unruly mob? Those who watched the HBO series John Adams might have been surprised that Adams defended the British soldiers. He argued that they were being cornered, bullied, and pelted with snow and ice by the cities miscreants. They were hooligans, in other words. Those actually protesting British rule, Adams claimed, were much more orderly. His argument was successful, as they were all acquitted.

But that does not mean the “massacre”—a term that is itself a politicized description, just like Adams’s use of “mob”—does not reveal a lot about the coming of the American Revolution. Eric Hinderaker’s new book, Boston’s Massacre (Harvard UP) uses the episode to tell a much larger story. Besides giving an exhaustive overview of the events that transpired on March 5, 1770, including extensive details concerning the city and its governing structure, Hinderaker explores the world that led to it as well as the multiple worlds it created. This story is both explicitly intimate—when learning about all the various people who played leading roles in the story, I was reminded of how small and parochial Boston really was—as well as exceptionally broad, as it situated Boston within an immense and evolving British empire.

The first half of the book is a series of thematic chapters focused on different lenses through which to see the massacre’s origins. For example, one chapter discusses changing beliefs concerning a standing militia within Britain and her colonies, and another details how resistance efforts operated in the half-decade following the Stamp Tax ordeal. The Massachusetts colony was a proud participant in the effort to build Boston as an imperial space, and only came to regret it when that very power was turned against against their residents. The story of Britain in the mid-eighteenth century is the birth of a militant power. When the empire won broad new swaths of land from France, it inherited dozens of forts and thousands of miles that had to be guarded. This required a radical expansion of the standing army. Those in the colonies were not used to these new circumstances and often fought back. Hinderaker’s analysis usefully interweaves comparative examples to help understand the Boston experience, including those inside Britain (Ireland) as well as outside (Spanish New Orleans). I learned quite a bit concerning how imperial militias were governed, moved, and housed in the early-modern period.

And then there’s the massacre itself. The most striking detail about Hinderaker’s account is how up-front he is concerning how little we know about it. He digs through particular interviews, trial notes, prosecution and defense arguments, as well as propaganda, and concludes that nearly all of it is clouded by agendas. Did the captain instruct the soldiers to fire? Were there more shooters on the second floor of the customs house? While Hinderaker explores these questions and provides exquisite detail, he concludes that much of the event will remain a mystery. What is clear, though, is the surrounding circumstances: Boston had become a crowded city with unwanted soldiers housed in makeshift barracks and gunning for the locals’ jobs. At the very least, they were an affront to the city’s character. The massacre was the culmination of imperial conflict. But some in the town also saw the mob violence that led to the shooting as equally contemptible. In defending the soldiers, John Adams and his fellow lawyers sought to save their city’s reputation by blaming it on the neighborhood’s miscreants; most notably, he played up the role of Crispus Attucks, a slave of Native and African American descent, who Adams differentiated from the calm, reasonable, and collected patriots of Boston.

The book takes a different approach once the trials are concluded. The final chapters focus on how the meanings of the massacre evolved over time. Hinderaker persuasively demonstrates that the event drew little attention outside of New England—or even Boston, for that matter—for quite some time. But it certainly became part of the city’s consciousness during the Revolution. Annual lectures commemorated March 5 for a decade, and speakers highlighted British tyranny and colonial innocence. But the event’s importance subsided after the conflict’s conclusion in 1783. From that point on it was a point of ambivalence. Highlighting it did indeed cement Boston’s role in the revolutionary struggle, but it also opened them up to accusations of lawlessness. This anxiety has persisted ever since, and has been present at every moment of resurgent memory.

But that did not keep different groups from appropriating the event as their own. Some were unexpected, like when abolitionists in the 1850s played up the role of Crispus Attucks as a martyr for America’s origins. (Remember: John Adams used Attucks as an unruly scapegoat to preserve Boston’s responsible character; that his words were later use to make Attucks a hero demonstrates the malleability of memory.) Then, in the twentieth century, when Americans worried about the rise of a military state, the massacre was once again dusted off and displayed. Memories of 1770 Boston resurfaced with debates ranging from the Kent State shootings in 1970 to Michael Brown in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter. I’m sure the story will still be used in similarly innovative and significant ways in the future.

As you can tell, Boston’s Massacre is a sprawling narrative. As a result, there are times when it didn’t seem to hold together, as the individual parts were more coherent than the whole. Since the chapters were thematic and danced around the event, rather than taking a strict chronological development toward and away from it, there were portions that seemed redundant. Particular chapters jumped forward and backward in ways that could appear confusing. The text sometimes reads better as a collection of essays. In a way, that kaleidascope structure reflects the massacre itself, as the angle through which one chooses to look largely determines the picture that you see. This is an excellent historical meditation on a crucial story—not to mention the historical craft. I look forward to assigning portions of it in class.