Mormons in AP US History

A religious reason to head west, from Nauvoo to the Great Basin

Topic 6.3 lists railroad construction, ranching, mining, and farming as the opportunities that pulled migrants west. The Mormons give you a different cause. They moved to find a place where they could practice their faith without being attacked.

The church grew out of the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York. Its new scripture, its close-knit communities, and later its practice of plural marriage (polygamy) angered neighbors wherever Mormons settled. In 1844 a mob killed Joseph Smith in a jail in Carthage, Illinois. Brigham Young then led the 1846-47 trek to the Great Basin, land that still belonged to Mexico when the first group arrived. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo made it U.S. territory a year later.

Unit 6 (Industrialization and the Gilded Age) uses the Mormons in Topic 6.3, Westward Expansion: Social and Cultural Development. The course asks you to explain the causes and effects of settling the West. The Mormons show that migrants chasing "independence and self-sufficiency" could mean religious independence as well as economic independence.

Irrigation ditches and Promontory Summit: the economic side

The Salt Lake Valley was dry, so Mormon settlers dug irrigation canals to carry mountain streams onto their fields. The church organized labor collectively, and settlements spread across the Great Basin. A church-run fund helped converts from Britain and Scandinavia pay for the trip, so Utah's population kept growing through immigration.

This ties straight into Topic 6.2, Westward Expansion: Economic Development. As the transcontinental railroad approached, the church established Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution in 1868, partly in anticipation of the growing trade and competition the line would bring. The railroad was completed at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, and Mormon crews worked grading contracts on it. The railroad ended Utah's isolation and brought in non-Mormon miners and merchants. Salt Lake City grew into a commercial hub, which is a good example of the course's point that railroads and mining created new communities and centers of commercial activity.

Polygamy laws, Reynolds v. United States, and the 1896 statehood deal

Most of the Mormon story that falls inside 1877-1898 is about federal power. Congress banned bigamy in U.S. territories with the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act in 1862. In Reynolds v. United States (1879), the Supreme Court upheld a polygamy conviction and ruled that the First Amendment protects religious belief but doesn't exempt religious practice from a general criminal law.

Congress kept escalating. The Edmunds Act (1882) made it easier to prosecute polygamists and barred them from voting. The Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) disincorporated the church and allowed the government to seize church property. In 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a Manifesto ending the official practice of plural marriage, and Utah became a state in 1896.

This lines up with another Topic 6.3 story. The Dawes Act also passed in 1887, and both policies used federal law to push Western groups toward mainstream American norms. A strong essay notes the limits of the comparison. Mormons were mostly white citizens who eventually won statehood, while American Indians lost land and had their tribal sovereignty denied.

Placing the 1847 trek versus the Gilded Age conflict

Do not treat the Salt Lake trek as a Gilded Age event. It happened in 1847, thirty years before the 1877-1898 window in the Unit 6 learning objectives. If a prompt is limited to that window, use the railroad's arrival, the Edmunds-Tucker Act, the 1890 Manifesto, or 1896 statehood as your evidence.

The Mormons also get blurred with the Puritans, since both groups fled persecution and built church-centered communities. Keep the dates and directions separate. The Puritans crossed the Atlantic in the 1600s, and the Mormons crossed the continent in the 1840s. Used on purpose, the pairing makes a solid continuity argument about religious migration in American history.

Where Mormon evidence earns points in essays and short answers

On the Long essay, a prompt about why people settled the West, or how federal power grew in the late 1800s, gives you room to bring in the Mormons as specific evidence. In the Document-based question, they work as outside evidence when the documents focus on miners, farmers, or American Indians. You can use them to argue that migration had religious causes too.

Short-answer questions and multiple-choice sets can use sources such as excerpts or maps to ask about western settlement. To answer well, you need to see which motive or federal policy the source is pointing to. A top answer names specifics, such as Brigham Young, the Salt Lake Valley, the polygamy laws, and 1896 statehood. Then it ties them to the claim. "A religious group moved west" won't earn the evidence point by itself.