Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/367



The State had been regarded as very close between the Democrats and Whigs and as the Mormon vote was generally cast nearly solid which ever way the leaders advised, it might possibly in this election determine the contest in favor of the party securing it. Fitz Henry Warren, chief manager of the Whig campaign, conferred with the Mormon leaders at Kanesville, where some six hundred voters were then living and succeeded in securing that vote for his party. Had the Mormon vote been counted in the returns, Daniel F. Miller, Whig, of the First District, would have been elected to Congress. The Democrats objected to the canvass of the vote of Pottawattamie County, when it became known that the Mormons living there had voted the Whig ticket. The ground for rejecting the vote was as follows. The county had not yet been organized, but the preliminary steps had been taken. Wm. S. Townsend, a Democrat, had been appointed by the judge of that district, sheriff, for the purpose of completing the organization, and had ordered an election on the first Monday in April. But Townsend having learned that the Mormon vote was likely to be given to the Whig party, refused to serve, and the county organization was not completed. The Mormons seeing that they were likely to lose their votes, petitioned the county commissioner of Monroe (the nearest organized county on the east) to organize a township embracing enough territory to include the Mormon settlement and thus enable them to take part in the elections. The petition was granted, and they voted at the August election. When the poll books of the Mormon township were returned to the county-seat of Monroe, the clerk refused to receive or recognize them. It was known, however, that the vote of that township stood thirty votes for Thompson and 493 for Miller. Had the vote of that township been counted, Miller would have been elected. The messenger who brought the poll books to Albia, laid them on the clerk’s desk, while an exciting controversy was going on between A. C. Hall, who represented the