The Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions

Abstract

This article examines how the cultural concept of the American home shaped Reconstruction politics in the American West. In a post-Civil War era in which Republicans sought a national culture and homogenous citizenry, ideas about what made a proper home became a powerful way to measure the potential inclusion of western minority groups. Three “questions”—the Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions—became some of the most pressing and passionately debated political controversies of the period. Historians have tended to treat these questions separately, but American congressmen, policy makers, and reformers discussed the three groups in remarkably similar ways. Ultimately, these Americans asked a single question—who had the right to possess homes and, by extension, American citizenship. These commentators, the article argues, saw Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons as unfit for U.S. citizenship for three main reasons: their failure to create proper homes, their threat to white homes, and their occupation of land that could otherwise be settled with white homes and families. When examined together, the western questions reveal how the American home, born in an emancipatory moment, became a blunt and violent tool of Reconstruction in the West.