“Brent Rogers skillfully places the Utah experience at the fulcrum of America’s growing sectional divide in the 1850s and offers important new insights into the deterioration of the Union. This book will force historians of the West to consider Utah Territory alongside Kansas Territory as a hotbed of national debate over popular sovereignty. Beyond that, it should prompt a recalibration of the national narrative to reflect the ways in which religion helped to define what it meant to be an American in the decade leading into the Civil War, sometimes just as much as race.”—W. Paul Reeve, author of Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness
“Balanced and extensively researched.”—Nicole Etcheson, author of A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community
“Popular sovereignty, an influential political doctrine in antebellum America, is generally linked to the question of slavery in the territories. But as Brent Rogers shows in this careful study, politicians, administrators, citizens, and soldiers also applied this concept to events and currents in Utah Territory, enriching our understanding of contradictions and inconsistencies in the relationship between the federal government and its western territories.”—Brian Q. Cannon, director of the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University author of Reopening the Frontier: Homesteading in the Modern West
