Conflict and Compromise

The fresh title notwithstanding, Melville’s Conflict and Compromise: The Mormons in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Politics is not a new work. A sketchy survey of the political events in early territorial Utah has been added, but in substance, this book is a reprint—apparently from the very same plates—of the author’s Highlights in Mormon Political History which was originally published in the Brigham Young University Merrill Monograph Series in 1967. I was not aware that this was the case when I agreed to prepare a review for BYU Studies, and this unanticipated duplication places me in a somewhat awkward position since I reviewed the work in its earlier form for Dialogue (3 [Winter 1968]: 103–104). Upon discovery of this situation, my first impulse was to suggest that, because the new book is essentially the same as the earlier one, this fact could be noted and the readers directed to the earlier reviews of the work. However, as I reread the account of “The Mormon in the Frontier Politics of Iowa” and the discussion of “The Mormons and the Compromise of 1850” and read the added section on “The Infant Steps of Territorial Government” for the first time, I realized that 1968 assessments of Professor Melville’s work will not serve in 1975. For one thing, the world of Mormon history has changed since this monograph was prepared. For another, a virtual revolution in methodology has occurred in the whole general area of political history in the intervening years. The standards by which a work of this nature must be judged have changed dramatically, and—evaluated with modern criteria in mind—Conflict and Compromise simply fails to measure up as useful scholarship.

The second (and longest) section of the book purports to explain, for example, how and why the U.S. Congress provided the Mormons in the Great Basin with a territorial rather than a state government. Yet the analysis is entirely based on Mormon sources and the public debates recorded in the journals of the U. S. Senate and House of Representatives. The author has made no real effort to place the question in the full context of the complicated national political situation of the time, and has been content, instead, to narrate the story almost precisely as John M. Bernhisel, the Saints’ Washington lobbyist, related it to the LDS Church Presidency. Moreover, while Holman Hamilton’s Prologue to Conflict was published in 1964, no reference is made to this standard work on the Compromise of 1850. Also, no notice is taken of Thomas B. Alexander’s Sectional Stress and Party Strength: A Study of Roll-Call Voting Returns in the United States House of Representatives, 1836–1860 or any of the other words in which congressional roll calls have been “scaled” or “clustered,” even though the importance of roll-call analysis in the explanation of the behavior of legislative bodies has been amply demonstrated.