THE B . H . ROBERTS CASE O F 1898-1900 BY R. DAVIS BITTON* JANUARY 25, 1900, the House of Representatives by a vote ^-^ of 268 to 50, refused to seat Brigham Henry Roberts, congressman-elect from the newly-admitted state of Utah. The events leading up to that exclusion illustrate a period of significant transition. For the last decade of the nineteenth century in Utah was one of momentous change, a period in which were caught up together the problems and conflicts of the nineteenth century and the promise of the twentieth. The transition from pre-Manifesto to post-Manifesto social orientations, the mollifying of the bitter Mormon-Gentile conflict, the mass shifts in political loyalty accompanying the rise of national parties in Utah, the advancement from territorial status and carpet-bag government to statehood and selfgovernment—all these threads converge in the B. H. Roberts' case of 1898-1900. /^\N
I Roberts was born in Warrington, Lancashire, England, on March 13, 1857. His parents were converts to the Mormon Church, and in 1862 his mother with two of the youngest children left for Utah. He followed in 1866 and joined the family in Bountiful, Utah, where he worked on the farms and in the mines of the territory. At the age of seventeen, Roberts was apprenticed to a blacksmith, thus following the trade his father had practiced in England. In 1877, with only a modicum of secondary school background, he entered the University of Deseret, from which he graduated as valedictorian in 1878. That same year he married Louisa Smith. For most of the 1880's Roberts was engaged in missionary work. At the age of twenty-three, he was called on a two-year mission to the Mid-western and Southern states. When this mission was completed, he was immediately called on another mission, and, still in his twenties, was named as mission president. In 1885, just before he was transferred to the British Mission, he took as his second *Mr. Bitton has done graduate work at the Brigham Young University and is currently working toward his doctorate at Princeton University.
