The Mormon Rebellion

In this volume David L. Bigler and Will Bagley set out “to provide a new factual basis for considering the causes and consequences” of the Utah War (p. 9). “Facts matter” to Bigler and Bagley, and the authors are intent on correcting the historical record (ibid.). As they describe it, that record is monolithic and dominated by the characterization of the Utah War as President James Buchanan’s “blunder.” Bigler and Bagley are convinced that rather than committing a blunder, Buchanan acted wisely when he ordered 2,500 federal troops to Utah Territory in 1857 to suppress a Mormon rebellion. In their view, it was a confrontation between a bloody theocratic tyranny and the American republic. Many historians may find Bigler’s and Bagley’s positivist language jarring. Their promise of an “accurate reinterpretation” and “an honest look” at the Utah War based on the “facts” asserts an elusive impartiality that ignores the multiple and frequently conflicting perspectives that permeate the historical record (p. xi). As it stands, The Mormon Rebellion is written to revise and supplant a historiographical straw man that the authors prop up as “Buchanan’s Blunder.” Richard D. Poll and Ralph W. Hansen did publish an article with that title in the fall 1961 issue of Military Affairs—a citation curiously missing from Bigler’s and Bagley’s bibliography—but certainly Utah War historiography has not remained static for the last fifty years. Poll’s own views evolved over time as witnessed by an article he coauthored with William P. MacKinnon that is not cited in Mormon Rebellion (“Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered,” Journal of Mormon History, spring 1994, pp. 16–44). Not only are Bigler and Bagley responding to an outdated version of the war but they also fail to engage recent scholarship, such as Matthew J. Grow’s 2009 biography of Thomas L. Kane, Liberty to the Downtrodden, also oddly missing from the bibliography

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