The Utah War — 'The Hand of God Is Visible in All Things': Deliverance Without Battle (1858)

In 1857 President James Buchanan, without investigation, sent a fifth of the United States Army — about 2,500 troops under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston — to install a new governor in Utah Territory. Brigham Young, still the territorial governor, mobilized the Nauvoo Legion. The news reached the Saints at the height of their 24th of July celebration in Big Cottonwood Canyon, when four horsemen rode in to report that the army was on the plains. Rather than flee, President Young declared before the assembled Saints: "We have transgressed no law, and we have no occasion to do so, neither do we intend to; but as for any nation's coming to destroy this people, God Almighty being my helper, they cannot come here." The Saints' defenders under Lot Smith burned the army's supply trains on the plains, and the army was forced to winter at a desperate, half-starved camp near Fort Bridger. In the mountain passes the Legion fortified Echo Canyon, and through the winter an armed invasion hung over the territory.

On March 23, 1858, rather than watch their city become a battlefield, Brigham Young put into motion the most remarkable civilian movement in American history to that time: the 'Move South.' Thirty thousand people — nearly the whole population of northern Utah — evacuated Salt Lake City and the northern settlements and moved south to Provo, leaving the capital empty. The city was prepared to be burned to the ground rather than surrendered; guards were left with orders that not a house should be occupied by the invading army.

In June 1858 President Buchanan sent two peace commissioners — former Kentucky governor Lazarus W. Powell and Major Ben McCullough — to negotiate. In the Council House at Provo, before a house full of Saints, Brigham Young addressed the commissioners in what Wilford Woodruff described as 'the power of God,' telling them the Saints knew their rights and dared maintain them, 'trusting in God for victory.' The commissioners conceded that all arrangements were made and that there would be peace.

On June 26, 1858, Johnston's Army marched through the silent, abandoned streets of Salt Lake City with fixed bayonets — and passed on to establish Camp Floyd forty miles southwest. Not a shot had been fired in the Valley; not a home was harmed. By August the Saints had returned from Provo to find their houses, fields, and property preserved. What had been dispatched as a war ended without a battle — a deliverance the Saints themselves universally attributed to the hand of God. As Brigham Young told the Saints in American Fork the day the peace was settled, the hand of God was visible in all things, and He 'has brought us to our present position of peace and has hedged up the way of our Enemies.'

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Utah History Encyclopedia, 'The Utah War' by Richard D. Poll):

The Utah War, 1857-1858, was a costly, disruptive and unnecessary confrontation between the Mormon people in Utah Territory and the government and army of the United States. Drummond and other former territorial officials, he and his cabinet decided that the Mormons would resist the replacement of Governor Brigham Young. So, without investigation, the contract for mail service to Utah was canceled and 2,500-man military force was ordered to accompany Alfred Cumming to Great Salt Lake City. Meanwhile, the Mormon communities were called upon to equip a thousand men for duty in the one hundred miles of mountains that separated Camp Scott and Great Salt Lake City. Despite his belligerent public posture, Brigham Young never intended to force a showdown with the U.S. Army. Early in 1858 exploring parties were sent to locate a place of refuge that Young believed to exist in the central Great Basin. By the time they returned with negative reports, the Utah War was over. That Young hoped for a diplomatic solution is clear from his early appeal to Thomas L. On 23 March Young announced that the time had come to implement the 'Sebastopol' policy, a plan named after a strategy.