Item Detail
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9470
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10
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14
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English
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A Stench in the Nostrils of Honest Men : Southern Democrats and the Edmunds Act of 1882
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon Thought
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Autumn 1988
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21
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100-113
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Buice discusses anti-Mormon sentiment in the United States, and briefly reviews the federal legislation against polygamy, from about 1860 to the time of the Edmunds Act. He then disucsses the political concerns that led to the Edmunds' proposal, and the debates on the proposal. There was considerable opposition to it, stemming largely from the South. Joseph E. Brown, for example, former Confederate Governor of Georgia, was a fanatic advocate of states' rights, and saw the measure in that light. He was also political, however, and tried at least to increase the Democratic presence on the proposed election commission by proposing that not more than three members could be from the same party. George Vest of Missouri also opposed it, because even though he detested polygamy he believed the proposed law subverted the constitution rights of citizens. Other southerners made similar charges against the bill, reflecting their long-standing constitutional emphasis on local rights. The author discusses the dire consequenses the law's opponents predicted, as well as the expectations of its proponents, and says that, in reality, it resulted in neither. The irony of the situtation was that southerners in Congress defended a religious minority in the name of preserving constitutional rights, but the rights of that same minority were often blatantly violated in the South, 'and for the rest of the century and on into the next that singularly southern mixture of fellowship and fear continually confronted the Mormon elders assigned to the Southern States Mission.'
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Backcounty Missionaries in the Post-Bellum South : Thomas Ephraim Harper's Experience
Finally Statehood! Utah's Struggles, 1849-1896
History of the LDS Southern States Mission, 1867-1898
'Lawyers of Their Own to Defend Them':
Mormon Polygamy : A Bibliography, 1977-92
Solemn Covenant : The Mormon Polygamous Passage
The Mormon Menace : Violence and Anti-Mormonism in the Postbellum South
The Mormon Question : Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America
The Reed Smoot Hearings : A Quest for Legitimacy -
A Comprehensive History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
A History of Mormon Missions in the United States and Canada, 1830-1860
History of the Southern States Mission, 1831-1861
Mormon Beginnings in the American South
Myth, Mormonism, and Murder in the South
Senator George Graham Vest and the 'Menace' of Mormonism, 1882-1887
Tennessee's Mormon Massacre
The Awesome Power of Sex : The Polemical Campaign against Mormon Polygamy
The Mormon Experience : A History of the Latter-day Saints
The Mormon Issue in Congress, 1872-1882, Drawing on the Experience of Territorial Delegate George Q. Cannon
The Political Reconstruction of Utah Territory, 1866-1890
There is no Law : A History of Mormon Civil Relations in the Southern States, 1865-1905
The Story of the Latter-day Saints
The Twin Relic : A Study of Mormon Polygamy and the Campaign by the Government of the United States for its Abolition, 1852-1890