The July 4 Tribune editorial "Historic Utah flag deserves a spot of honor," does disservice to the facts of Utah's territorial history, and ignores the Great Basin Mormon's profoundly important concept of sovereignty.
Their Kingdom of God required a sovereign entity, a geographical stand-alone, ruled by men selected by God to lead the nation and the world to the righteousness required for millennial preparation.
The state of Deseret was that required entity, but it existed only in the hearts of Brigham Young, the Mormon theocratic leaders and the most faithful Saints. However, in 1850 the federal government gave them — not statehood — but a territory named for the dominant native people of the region, and controlled by a federal government they despised and considered evil.
The legislature of the state of Deseret would meet in chambers, draft a petition for sovereign statehood and write and vote on legislation. It would then close and reopen as the Utah Territorial legislature, accepting all laws and action passed by the fictitious Deseret. Mormon leaders unsuccessfully petitioned nine times for a state of Deseret.
Mormons did not see the Civil War in terms of ending the evils of slavery or maintaining loyalty to the Union. Mormons perceived the war as precipitating events that would hasten their achieving sovereignty. Both the North and South would be utterly destroyed, the LDS Church's priesthood would take the reigns of government — first of the United States, then the world — and under their God-directed rule they would prepare the Earth for Christ's return. Hundreds of thousands of the war's widows would be taken into polygamy, and the war's orphans would become Mormons.
These hostile prophecies resounded from Mormon pulpits repeatedly throughout the Civil War years until the fall of Charleston, Fort Fisher, Richmond, and the April 9, 1865, events at Appomattox Courthouse proved it not so.
To claim that the flag of the state of Deseret carries no disloyal stigma ignores the facts that the forces of the United States Government were met in 1857 by a Mormon army of 7,000 and destroyed U. S. property worth millions. The California Volunteer Cavalry and Infantry were ordered to Utah Territory in 1862, where 90 percent of its leaders favored the South, while Brigham Young refused to send his army into service against the Confederacy. Open warfare between U.S. troops at Camp Douglas and those of the Mormon militia was repeatedly threatened from 1862 to 1866.
Some see the state of Deseret flag over Utah with its twelve stars surrounding a single larger star more symbolic of religious — than civil — history and that a theocratic empire lives on.
The University of Oklahoma Press will publish John Gary Maxwell's "The Civil War in Utah, The Kingdom of God and the Territory That Did Not Fight" later this year.
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