Ithaca College

Historian Pearl Ponce’s chapter on the Mormons’ disunion from the United States has been collected in Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century.

The historic vote of Great Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 (more commonly known as Brexit) prompted a conference and, subsequently, a book on other examples of union and disunion in the nineteenth century.  After participating in an international conference in Plymouth, England, in 2017, conference organizers invited her to contribute to Union and Disunion in the Nineteenth Century, published in December 2019 by Routledge Press.  Ponce’s chapter, entitled “Attempting Disunion:  Mutable Borders and the Mormon Experience with the United States, 1846-1858,” investigates what happened when the Mormons, seeking to escape prejudice, persecution, and anti-Mormon violence, left the United States to settle in what was then Mexico.  Within two months of settling around the Great Salt Lake Basin, war between the United States and Mexico broke out and, in the treaty that ended the war, the United States subsumed a great swath of territory, including the Mormon settlements, in the West.  This work looks at the ways in which the Mormons attempted to manage their forced reunion, culminating in the Utah War of 1857-1858 when President James Buchanan sent the Army to Utah to enforce the removal of Utah’s Territorial Governor, Brigham Young, who was simultaneously the President of the Mormon Church, a violation of the separation of church and state which greatly discombobulated Americans of the time.  

Learn more about her contribution and the volume here:  https://www.routledge.com/Union-and-Disunion-in-the-Nineteenth-Century-1st-Edition/Gregory-Grey/p/book/9781138354302