The motifs that have come to define the period of American history leading up to the Civil War likewise characterize the first few decades of existence of the LDS. A new idea, reviled by some and embraced by others, takes root in an established city on the East Coast. Fearing persecution or perhaps fleeing scandal, its originator seeks ever less populated areas in which to advance leadership, aiming for maximal freedom and control while also finding land which the group can conquer for a home base. As the movement grows, it ruptures, diverges, and comes into increasing conflict with the law. For the LDS church, the wedge issue was their practice of polygamy, but the focus on its salacious aspects overshadowed the fact that the legality of this belief largely served as a stage on which government officials and LDS leaders acted out the conflicts over territorial control. Polygamy, or bigamy as it was defined under the law, ran up against the image of the ideal nuclear family that existed at the time. Furthermore, the control Young and his successors exerted over the Utah Territory offered a blueprint for a type of conflict to beset the US repeatedly: that between the federal government and a band of settlers on the Western edge of the nation.
Overviews of US military history in the mid-1800s cover the Civil War; less discussed is the Utah War of 1857. Alternately known as the Utah Campaign and the Mormon War, among other names, the conflict predicted many of the same clashes that would emerge between Northern and Southern states a few years later. Historian Thomas G. Alexander writes that the newly elected President James Buchanan had featured the LDS church and its practice of polygamy as key campaign issues during his presidential run, a move largely dictated not by a personal dislike for the LDS faith, but rather as a reaction to claims that Buchanan and the Democrats were giving too much leeway to issues of both polygamy and slavery. By mid-1857, federal troops had begun to move toward Utah from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and in April 1858, Buchanan had issued a presidential proclamation demanding the allegiance of Utah government officials to the federal government. Faced with a lack of information about the military’s aims for the Utah Territory, LDS militias began to prepare defenses in the area hoping to hamper the troops’ progress. In the period of ratcheting tensions leading up to the war, groups of non-LDS settlers were killed by these militias in incidents including the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Alexander writes, under suspicion of harboring disguised troops or perhaps being US Army spies.