The year was 1893, and Mormon leaders had been working for decades to make Utah one of the United States. But like a ball and chain, the Mormon practice of polygamy dragged at every step.
Mormondom's "peculiar institution" had been banned by federal law and church President Wilford Woodruff's 1890 manifesto. Even so, polygamists clung to the practice they believed was divinely ordained.What the Mormon Church needed was a break - something to convince a suspicious nation that the Utah Territory would not continue as the idiosyncratic Mormon theocracy that critics made it out to be.
What the church needed was amnesty for those stubborn polygamists who relished the idea of statehood, but not at the cost of their faith and freedom.
It was shrewd politicking that turned the tide, 100 years ago Monday.
Then, as now, the leaders of Utah's predominant faith had to meld ecclesiastical ideals with secular realities. Indeed, Mormon tenets have influenced modern debates on topics ranging from liquor laws to abortion and, most recently, prayer at school functions and government meetings - the latter the subject of a potential amendment to the state constitution.
To solve the problem a century ago, Utah lobbyists had cultivated powerful friends in Washington who recognized that the Mormon influence in the Western states could not be ignored.
And while the Democratic Party long had been sympathetic to Utah's quest, the fact was that a Republican - Benjamin Harrison - was in the White House.
So the GOP needed the Mormons, and the Mormons needed a presidential proclamation.
"It's a Republican administration, not just individuals or a faction of the party, recognizing the Mormons are trying come into the mainstream," says historian E. Leo Lyman.
Harrison also had personal reasons. His wife, Caroline Lavinia Scott, lay on her deathbed, and the president asked for the prayers of the Mormon leadership.
"In desperation, he even wants whatever spiritual powers the Mormons had," Lyman said. It was to no avail. Carrie Harrison died in October 1892.
Top officials in the Harrison administration, meantime, advised Utah lobbyist Isaac Trumbo to poll the nation's powerful Protestant publishers of newspapers and magazines to see how the official Mormon renunciation of polygamy had been received.
"He did get widespread assurances that it was OK, at this time, to show this kind of cordiality to supposedly repentant Mormons," Ly-man said.
Finally, on Jan. 4, 1893, Harrison granted amnesty - but only for polygamists who renounced the practice as well as their surplus wives. Those who continued to live in plural marriage still could be prosecuted.
"It's not nearly as much as the church brethren hoped," says Lyman, author of "Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Statehood."
Still, Mormon leaders were pragmatic enough to take what they could get, he said, and they considered the decree to be, at the least, a welcome public relations coup.
"It's symbolic. . . . It's a means to the end, and the end is statehood and political independence," Ly-man said.
The proclamation also solidified a Mormon-Republican alliance that continues to this day, despite the early GOP's bitterly anti-Mormon stance.
The original Republican Party platform inveighed against the "twin relics of barbarism" - slavery and polygamy. But moderates eventually softened the party line to match with political realities in a growing nation that inevitably would include Mormons and other minority interests.
"When the party accepts cultural pluralism, they win Mormon allegiance," Lyman said, adding, "The irony of the whole thing is that the party that's the toughest on them ends up with the most loyalty from them."
It would take three more years for Utah to join the Union, and only after drafting a state constitution forbidding polygamy and containing strict provisions for separation of church and state.
As it happened, it was Democratic President Grover Cleveland who, three years to the day after Harrison's amnesty, signed the proclamation making Utah the 45th state.