Then, in an amazing but only transitory repentance, Toohy announced on March 4 that the convention had done a creditable job and Congress would ensure that polygamy would be eliminated. His only reservation concerned adoption of a secret ballot and the disqualification of women voters. But the conversion was short-lived as he began to censure the mass meetings held by the Mormon citizens in preparation for the election scheduled for March 18 to accept or reject the constitution adopted by the convention. A typically caustic comment was his reference to the Box Elder County meeting as "a filthy gathering of the rustic masses, or asses, of the foot-hills." 71 The Corinne editor's verbal assaults were his only consolation, as the electorate voted 25,324 to 368 in favor of the constitution. There would have been a much larger turnout of Gentile partisans, but the Liberals chose to boycott the election and to alert the national government by petitions and memorials in opposition to the admission of Utah. While the Deseret News thought its opponents were trying to keep the area out of the Union and in "territorial serfdom" because of their greed and ambition, 72 the National party sent a committee of three men, composed of J. Robinson Walker, Henry W. Lawrence, and Robert N. Baskin, to Washington to counter the efforts of the elected delegates who were presenting the new constitution. The New York Tribune supported the committee's efforts and editorialized that the "hierarchy of morbid fanatics" would, with statehood, drive out every Gentile and that if the "pernicious fruits of Mormonism are to be destroyed" it must be done under territorial influence.7' Corinne did its part by dispatching a memorial to Congress signed by eighty residents and by several other non-Mormons from Tooele and elsewhere.74 In urging the citizens to sign, the Reporter wrote, "We should have the flag of the free float over us instead of the black ensign of the Endowment. . . ." 7"' Familiar reasons for the retention of territorial status instead of statehood were included in the memorial: insufficiency of population, the control by a political theocracy, and the supposed Mormon doctrine that the priesthood would eventually replace democratic government. The Corinnethians need not have worried about losing their favored position under territorial government because the Congress refused, once again, to heed the plea of the Mormon people for Utah statehood.
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Corinne