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Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intriques
Hammering Utah, Squeezing Mexico, and Coveting Cuba: James Buchanan’s White House Intriques
By WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
We must have Cuba. We can’t do without Cuba . . .
— James Buchanan to Secretary of State John M. Clayton, April 17, 18491
I think in the next ten years we will have plenty to do in the war line –Mormon war, civil broils and strife … and other exciting topics, and last a war with Spain, resulting in the conquest of Cuba.
— Former Capt. William T. Sherman to Rep. John Sherman, January 18582
When President James Buchanan’s prosecution of the Utah War snagged upon unexpected, embarrassing Mormon resistance in early October 1857, the administration scrambled to rescue its Utah Expedition. Its response was to organize a massive, tactically risky spring attack on the Salt Lake Valley from California and Oregon Territory as well as across the Plains from military posts in Kansas and Nebraska territories.3
A New York political cartoon from 1858 depicting a nervous James Buchanan writing a valentine to Miss Cuba under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam.
AMERICAN ANTIQUARIAN SOCIETY
The purpose of this article is to probe the unexploited evidence that while Buchanan worked to reinforce the Utah Expedition from the Pacific Coast, he was secretly intriguing to use this thrust by Winfield Scott, the army’s general in chief, to advance a longstanding personal and diplomatic agenda heretofore unrecognized as linked to the Utah War. The president’s plan was to stimulate a mass Mormon exodus to Sonora, Mexico, at the point of a bayonet followed by acquisition of much of northern Mexico and Cuba through a combination of diplomatic and military gambits.
Although much of this presidential scheming was deferred, if not stillborn, by the spring of 1858, it is worth examining today as another illustration of the extent to which Utah’s history — including that of her conflicts with the U.S. government — has long been linked to forces that were regional and international as well as local in character. By examining James Buchanan’s administrative behavior, fantastic as it may seem today, Utahns also acquire a more complete understanding of the politicalmilitary pressures brought to bear on the territory during 1857-1858. Equally important, this incident sheds light on presidential leadership style during the fateful national secession crisis only three years later.
As presidential historian Michael Beschloss reminds us, though, it is not easy “… to dramatize a nonevent. Telling a tale that unfolded in conflicts behind Washington’s closed doors is more difficult than recounting the boom and bang of battlefields.”4
When James Buchanan assumed the presidency on March 4, 1857, “the Mormon problem” — what to do about Brigham Young and his highly controversial governance of Utah Territory — was so low among the president’s priorities that there was no discussion of it in his inaugural address. Yet, for reasons discussed elsewhere, within three weeks Utah had unexpectedly become a burning issue, with Buchanan resolving to replace Young and immersed in determining the size of the military force needed to escort the new territorial governor to Salt Lake City.5
If, on his arrival at the White House, Buchanan was not focusing on Utah, the acquisition of international territory in furtherance of American “Manifest Destiny” was on his agenda. With typical indirection, the new president included in his inaugural address the thought that, “It is our glory that, whilst other nations have extended their dominions by the sword, we have never acquired any territory except by fair purchase … Acting on this principle, no nation will have a right to interfere or to complain if, in the progress of events, we shall still further extend our possessions.”6
With respect to America’s immediate neighbor to the south, it is well to remember that during the Mexican War James Buchanan had served as President Polk’s secretary of state. At war’s end he was embroiled in the provocative debate over annexing all of Mexico and supervised the development of the treaty by which Mexico lost one-third of her territory to the United States.
Within weeks of his inauguration — on the day that the Utah Expedition began its march west — Buchanan secretly ordered John Forsyth, his minister to Mexico City, to seek a treaty with Mexico. By Buchanan’s terms, unsanctioned by an adjourned Congress, the U.S. would pay Mexico up to fifteen million dollars to purchase a vast northern region while clarifying American transit rights earlier established to build a railway across Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. With Mexico hyper-sensitive to American pressure and again teetering on the brink of revolution, Forsyth was so shocked by the aggressive tone of these instructions that he declined to communicate Buchanan’s offer to the Mexican government until forced to do so the next November. The leading historian of U.S.-Mexican relations of the period characterizes the president’s quest for Mexican territory as rapacious (“despoiling”) to the point of brutality.7
Buchanan’s interest in Cuba, a slave-holding Spanish colony, predated his focus on Mexico, rooted as it was in the country’s longstanding fascination with the island that began soon after the American Revolution and intensified throughout the nineteenth century.By the time Buchanan was Polk’s secretary of state the United States offered to buy the island for the then enormous price of one hundred million dollars, a proposition that Spain rejected contemptuously.8 Motivated by Cuba’s strategic location off the mouth of the Mississippi River, close proximity to Florida, and attractiveness to adventuresome European powers, an expansion-minded Buchanan was quoted as saying, “We must have Cuba...We shall acquire it by a coup d’état at some propitious moment, which...may not be far distant.” Shortly after leaving the state department in 1849, Buchanan advised his successor, “We must have Cuba. We can’t do without Cuba, & above all we must not suffer its transfer to Great Britain.” Before long, the notion had become embedded in the partisan sectional debate over the extension of American slavery.9
Five years later, in 1854, James Buchanan—by then U.S. minister to Great Britain—was again at the center of American intrigue over Cuba. While President Franklin Pierce was strongly committed to acquiring the island, he was befuddled as to how best to proceed given the uproar over the expansion of slavery unleashed that year by Pierce’s embroilment with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. To clarify the Cuba issue without further aggravating sectional tensions, Secretary of State William L. Marcy quietly instructed the U.S. ministers to Spain (Pierre Soulé of Louisiana), Great Britain (James Buchanan of Pennsylvania), and France (John Y. Mason of Virginia) to develop a Cuban acquisition policy for the administration to consider. Buchanan assured his volatile colleague, Soulé, that “... there is no citizen of the United States more anxious than myself for the accomplishment of this object in a fair and honorable manner.”10
A meeting between the three diplomats took place in October 1854 in Ostend, Belgium, to draft the requested memorandum. At the heart of this document were multiple rationalizations for American interest in Cuba, especially her strategic location commanding the mouth of the Mississippi River and the potential for a bloody Haitian-like slave revolt on the island under the harshness of continued Spanish control. Among the most controversial passages of the Ostend Manifesto were those in which Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé jointly asserted that if Spain refused their recommended offer of up to $120 million, “by every law, human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain …”11 Buchanan privately expressed the personal view to Secretary Marcy that the acquisition of Cuba was “a necessity,” one for which “... we ought to be willing, if necessary, to risk a war.”12
Almost immediately this meeting became the subject of widespread international controversy, especially in the United States, an embarrassment that forced the Pierce administration to disavow the Ostend Manifesto. In the face of this incident, all efforts to acquire Cuba came to a halt in somewhat the same fashion as did President Pierce’s simultaneous but unrelated attempts to replace Brigham Young after Brevet Lt. Col. Edward Jenner Steptoe’s embarrassing refusal to accept Utah’s governorship in the spring of 1855.13
Yet if Franklin Pierce lacked constancy in the face of obstacles, James Buchanan was often tenacious, especially if he thought he could proceed secretly and the matter at issue advanced his political agenda. Not long after his inauguration, Buchanan picked up where his predecessor left off with respect to Cuba and Utah.
The president’s minister to Spain, an Iowan with the appropriately imperial name Augustus Caesar Dodge, recognized this doggedness. In late September 1857, he wrote Buchanan from Madrid, “The acquisition of Cuba I am well aware from your early and unflagging advocacy of the measure, is one which will be cherished and promoted throughout your entire administration. . . . [but] I can see little or no probability of our acquiring Cuba by any diplomatic means heretofore employed at this court and without a change in the ways and means.” 14 In December, almost as on cue from Minister Dodge, Buchanan returned to Cuban matters and did so with the recommended unconventionality.
Sir William Gore Ouseley. This self-portrait pencil sketch c. 1830 depicts Ouseley as a young man diplomat-artist.
WIKIMEIDA COMMONS
It was a month of multiple challenges for the president during which Minister Forsyth was simultaneously dealing with Mexican rage over Buchanan’s recently delivered treaty demands of the prior July as well as the onset of a full-blown revolution. In Washington, Buchanan himself was grappling with aggressive congressional demands for information about the Utah Expedition’s origins and cost in the wake of the Panic of 1857.
On December 13, 1857 — literally as Buchanan was about to invite Thomas L. Kane to the Executive Mansion to discuss his intent to mediate the Utah War — the president met secretly with another lawyer from Philadelphia, Christopher Fallon.15 In Fallon’s case, the presidential agenda was a plan to dispatch him to Madrid as the quiet vanguard of a renewed effort to buy Cuba.
Christopher Fallon, a forty-eight-year-old U.S. citizen of Irish parentage, Spanish birth, and Philadelphia residence, was closely connected to members of the Spanish royal family as a financial advisor. Fallon had no governmental standing, although, because of his profession and place of residence, he was known not only to President Buchanan but unquestionably to Kane as well as to the president’s two closest Utah War advisors in Philadelphia, U.S. attorney James C. Van Dyke and lawyer Robert Tyler, son of former president John Tyler.16
What Buchanan asked Fallon to do during their clandestine meeting on December 13 was to sound out the cash-strapped Spanish king about his willingness to sell Cuba to the United States. The obvious implication was that part of any purchase price would find its way to the royal coffers as well as to the Spanish national treasury. Coincident with these overtures in Madrid, Fallon’s instructions directed him to begin discussions with European bankers about financing the purchase, a necessity inasmuch as Buchanan had neither discussed Cuba with Congress nor sought its authorization for such an acquisition. There is a distinct possibility that neither Secretary of State Cass nor Buchanan’s trusted secretary of the treasury, Howell Cobb, were aware of Fallon’s mission. It is a significant indication of Buchanan’s deviousness that he privately enlisted Fallon in such a gambit only five days after sending his annual address to Congress without a reference to Cuba. In the “Private & Confidential” instructions that Buchanan gave Fallon, he assured his agent that “Both you & those with whom you converse may rely with confidence upon my silence & discretion.”17
Thus at year-end 1857 Christopher Fallon sailed east to Madrid, Thomas L. Kane headed west to Utah via Panama and California, and to the south John Forsyth witnessed the slide of Mexico into chaotic revolution. Unlike the cabinets of Presidents Pierce and Lincoln, which bracketed his, James Buchanan’s department heads included no diarist, and the president himself did not keep a journal. With Buchanan presiding schoolmaster-like over informal cabinet luncheons on a near-daily basis, much of his administration’s business was handled conversationally rather than through an exchange of interdepartmental memoranda. Ever the cautious lawyer and political creature, Buchanan often responded to incoming mail or sensitive matters either face-to-face or not at all. With these restricted resources and the president’s guarded, convoluted personal style, there is a paucity of surviving material shedding light on Buchanan’s inner thoughts during the Utah War.18
While this thin written record is the key to determining much of why and what President Buchanan did during this period, it is based on notes kept by credible visitors to the Executive Mansion who interacted directly with Buchanan or one of his cabinet officers. In many ways, the most valuable accounts flowing from such insiders were the long, newsy Washington dispatches written to Brigham Young at least monthly by Utah’s territorial delegate in Congress, Dr. John M. Bernhisel. Yet with respect to the Utah War, Bernhisel’s reports have limitations since he seemed intimidated by Buchanan, avoided contact with him at key junctures, and once even withdrew from Washington during a crucial period.19
Another source potentially even more valuable to historians than Bernhisel’s reporting were the dispatches generatedby Washington-based European ambassadors for their foreign secretaries. Like journalists, the job of these diplomats was, among others, to report on major American events, economic conditions, and governmental issues relevant to their home country. Unlike newspaper reporters, foreign envoys often had direct access to the president as well as to Secretary of State Cass. For example, at one critical juncture in the fall of 1857 a dispatch written by Edward A. de Stoeckel, Russian minister to Washington, immediately following a meeting with Buchanan shed light on the president’s frustrations with “the Mormon problem” and his reactions to rumors of plans for a mass Mormon exodus to Russian America (Alaska). It was an important dispatch that helped trigger Tsar Alexander II’s decision in December 1857 to authorize negotiations to sell Alaska to the U.S. rather than risk its seizure by Brigham Young without compensation.20
During 1857-1858, one of the more interesting writers of diplomatic dispatches in Washington was the envoy closest to President Buchanan — Sir William Gore Ouseley. He was an old British friend from Ouseley’s posting to Washington in the late 1820s while Buchanan was still in Congress and Buchanan’s assignment as head of the Pierce administration’s diplomatic legation in London during 1853-1856. In the midst of the Utah War — at about the time of Lot Smith’s October 1857 raid, when Buchanan first became aware that the Utah Expedition was beleaguered and needed reinforcements — Ouseley arrived in Washington. He was on his way to a diplomatic post not in that city but rather in Central America. Nevertheless, Ouseley dallied in Washington unofficially for nearly twelve months, and quickly assumed the role of presidential confidant — even confessor — on international matters. That Ouseley succeeded in forging such an intimate tie with President Buchanan so rapidly was attributable to multiple factors: the length of their friendship; their similarity in age; the diplomat’s charm and that of his American-born wife; their mutual connection to the Roosevelt family of New York; Buchanan’s isolation as an aging bachelor virtually alone in the Executive Mansion; the multiple political pressures besetting the president; and Buchanan’s significant lack of confidence in his ineffectual secretary of state, Lewis Cass.21
President James Buchanan.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Ouseley’s unaccredited presence in Washington during 1857-1858 is itself a complex story laced with ambiguity, intrigue, and manipulation. When Ouseley left Great Britain in October 1857, his post was to be in Central America. His charge was to resolve a series of outstanding diplomatic issues that had grown out of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 to impact negatively the British-American relationship in the western Caribbean and the adjacent republics of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras. Technically Ouseley was only passing through Washington in 1857 as a transient, seeking American approbation for his mission and awaiting the tactically advantageous time to take up his negotiating assignment in Central America. From the distance of London, the waspish secretary of the American legation commented, “The General [Cass] is in a mist [fog] about Ouseley’s Mission, which I am not surprised at, for I don’t believe Ouseley himself knows what he is about, or what he was ever sent to Washington for.”22
Notwithstanding Buchanan’s protestations to the contrary, there are signs that early in his presidency he had arranged a temporary perch in Washington for Ouseley and his American-born wife because of his affinity for the couple. To British envoy Lord Francis Napier, Tenth Baron of Merchistoun, President Buchanan commented, “I had been very intimate with him & his lady during my residence in London. I entertained a very warm regard for both.”23
The seemingly open-ended, ambiguous nature of Ouseley’s presence in Washington and his obvious camaraderie with Buchanan created significant tensions, if not rivalry, in the capital’s British legation. These dynamics also spawned American press speculation as to whether Lord Napier or Ouseley carried the relationship between the two governments, especially since Ouseley also held the diplomatic rank of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. During the winter of 1857-1858, a Washington belle described Ouseley as the “Knight of the Mysterious Mission.” 24 In his dispatches to the British secretary of state for foreign affairs, George William Frederick Villiers, Fourth Earl of Clarendon, Ouseley disavowed intent to fuel these perceptions. He provided examples of how, to the contrary, he had taken steps to arrange intimate social contacts between Lord Napier’s young family and Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s niece and White House hostess. Nonetheless, the more Ouseley protested his selflessness and emphasized access to Buchanan, the more he subtly rationalized the merits of further delaying his departure for Central America. Implicit in this maneuvering was Ouseley’s message to Lord Clarendon about the value of his ability to report on Buchanan’s thoughts about not only Central America but Mexico, Cuba, and — unexpectedly — Utah. If Ouseley was not viewed by Lord Clarendon as the indispensable man in Washington, it was through no lack of trying on his part.
The medium for Ouseley’s reportage from Washington was a series of episodic dispatches written to Clarendon at his explicit invitation and marked “Private & Confidential,” a formal label signaling a higher sensitivity than even those more routine reports designated “Secret.”25 With his reports so marked and written on a special-sized paper signifying their importance, Ouseley’s dispatches were transmitted directly to Clarendon through an elaborate, three-stage trans-Atlantic courier system that by-passed the public postal services of both the United States and Great Britain. It was a delivery system worthy of a security conscious Brigham Young, who adopted similar procedures for sending and receiving his most sensitive letters across the United States and Europe.26 Understanding the arrangements by which confidential dispatches from Ouseley were encouraged by Lord Clarendon and then couriered to him is crucial to evaluating the candor as well as importance of these reports.
When Lord Clarendon left office in March 1858, he took Ouseley’s dispatches with him as private property. Accordingly, they came to rest in Clarendon’s personal papers rather than in the official files of the foreign office eventually accessible to the public in London’s National Archives.Consequently, the Ouseley material was and is sequestered; as such it remains largely unexploited.Today, these dispatches are under the control of the present Earl of Clarendon and are, in effect, on loan by him to Oxford University’s Bodleian Library.
Sir William Gore Ouseley at about the time of his 1857-1858 visit to Washington D.C.
HERITAGE IMAGES
Because of space limitations what appears below are excerpts from only two of Ouseley’s dispatches from the opening months of 1858, those most relevant to the Utah War.27 His reports provide a unique glimpse of James Buchanan and his cloistered White House world as he dealt with widely separated events heretofore viewed as unconnected. Here the president reacted in November 1857 to news of Lot Smith’s October raid in Utah; formulated his military response and presented it to Congress in December; simultaneously dispatched Christopher Fallon to Spain to buy Cuba and met with Thomas L. Kane about his intended mediation mission to Salt Lake City; coped with the rise of Benito Juarez and revolution in Mexico; and posted a reluctant General Scott to California to open a second front against the Mormons to hammer them from the Pacific Coast.
On January 23, 1858, in the midst of all these presidential activities, Sir William Gore Ouseley confided to Lord Clarendon:
It is fascinating to correlate Ouseley’s comments about Buchanan and Mexico with the fact that on January 18, five days before this dispatch, Delegate Bernhisel had written to Brigham Young to report that he had visited the president and that Buchanan had unexpectedly dropped his objections to the rumored possibility of a Mormon exodus from Utah to Mexico.31
On February 15, 1858, Ouseley reported again to Clarendon, this time to relay an account of what he had learned in confidence from Buchanan about the linkage between the president’s prosecution of the Utah War and his two highest priorities other than preservation of the Union — seizure of northern Mexico and the acquisition of Cuba by purchase or conquest:
Buchanan’s reported intent to try to steer a mass Mormon migration to Mexico rather than to the Pacific Northwest must have been a vast relief to Ouseley. For months the British had worried that the longstanding Mormon interest in Vancouver Island was being rekindled.37 Three days after Ouseley sent his February 15 dispatch to Lord Clarendon, the alarmed British colonial secretary in London cornered the U.S. minister, George Mifflin Dallas, at a royal reception and “… entered upon the topic of the [presumed] intention of the Mormons to migrate into the territory held by license by the Hudson Bay Company. He said if they once get there it would be difficult to get rid of them, notwithstanding the expressed repugnance of the Queen to have such ‘horrid creatures’ among her subjects.”38
Ouseley’s February 15, 1858, dispatch to Lord Clarendon was stunning in the complexity of the scheming that it attributed to Buchanan. The only study known to have commented upon this report summarized Ouseley’s conclusion as being to the effect that Buchanan had “hoodwinked” an unwitting Congress into considering the possibility of increasing the military budget. He did so by using “the Mormon problem” as a stalking horse for his real objectives to Utah’s south, Mexico and Cuba.39
From Buchanan’s comments to Ouseley it is clear that the president believed that annexation of some or all of Mexico could follow the establishment of a critical mass of Americans in Mexico along the lines of the break-away that had unfolded in the gigantic Mexican state of Tejas y Coahuila during the Texas Revolution of the 1830s. As historian Donathan Olliff — an authority on revolutionary Mexico — sees it, Buchanan viewed his objectives in Mexico “... as achievable by either of two methods, by purchase or by settlement of large numbers of United States citizens in the subject areas. … A large Yankee population could result in annexation by the will of the inhabitants, as had happened in Texas.” 40 Olliff was oblivious to the possibility of tens of thousands of Mormon refugees becoming such a “Yankee” influx, but James Buchanan was not. And so Brigham Young’s Move South, plotted for weeks and announced in Salt Lake City on March 21, 1858, takes on special significance.41
How Buchanan could believe that a southbound Mormon diaspora to Sonora — stimulated by military pressure from a Utah Expedition reinforced by General Scott from the Pacific Coast — would be willing to re-affiliate with the United States, is an intriguing mystery. Brigham Young had already been down that road after being driven out of Illinois and migrating to Mexico’s eastern Alta California (Utah) beginning in 1847. Ten years later Young still chafed over the approach of the Utah Expedition in the face of LDS participation in the Mexican War through the U.S. Army’s Mormon Battalion. To expect Young to flee to Sonora in 1858 at the point of American bayonets and then call for annexation by the United States as Texans had done fifteen years earlier, is counterintuitive. Utah’s Brigham Young was not Texas’s Stephen F. Austin, although one of the Utah Expedition’s anonymousdragoon privates saw it differently: “It is thought by many that the movement in Utah is a mere feint to attract public attention, while the administration is preparing for a blow at Mexico, under the guise of protection as laid down in Sam Houston’s revolution. This may be correct,and will account for the President’s anxiety to raise regular troops instead of volunteers to carry out the Mormon War. . . . It is evident that Old Buck is ‘spoiling for a fight,’ and intends to try his hand somewhere. Some are [contemptuous] enough to insinuate that the old man, having lived so long without getting a wife, is envious of Brother Brigham’s success among the ladies, and takes this mode of venting his rage.”42
Then there is the matter of Mexico’s likely reaction to such a humiliating chain of events. Normally such a scenario would trigger a war between the two states involved, as it had between Mexico and the United States in 1846 following American annexation of Texas. On the other hand, the chaos in revolutionary Mexico starting in January 1858 was such that Buchanan may have believed that he could risk forcing his will on that country as France’s Napoleon III later would do in sending an army into Mexico in 1864 to restore order and install an emperor and as President Woodrow Wilson would do in seizing and briefly occupying the Mexican port of Veracruz during 1914.
The means by which Buchanan planned subsequently to spring from Mexico to his apparent main objective, Cuba, is even more elusive. Unfortunately, the Cuban part of this expansionist billiards game was a scenario on which Ouseley did not report further. It appears based on Christopher Fallon’s mission, the arguments of the Ostend Manifesto, and Buchanan’s subsequent correspondence — that in early 1858 the president planned to purchase Cuba from a distressed and distracted Spain and, failing that, to consider taking the island forcibly, perhaps in the wake of an American-stimulated revolution on Cuba, as would actually happen in 1898. Notwithstanding the significant cash needs of Spain’s government and royal family, Fallon’s discussions failed later in 1858 in the face of hypersensitivity in Madrid over the blow to Spanish pride associated with any potential loss of Cuba.
Brevet Lt. General Winfield Scott.
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
How reliable was Sir William Gore Ouseley as a reporter of Buchanan’s inner thoughts and plans? To what extent can the president’s private conversations with him be taken at face value? The answers to these questions are important, for the Ouseley to Clarendon dispatches constitute the sole insider account of a comprehensive Buchanan plan to manipulate reinforcement of the Utah Expedition from the Pacific Coast to advance a billiards-like agenda involving a mass Mormon exodus to Sonora followed by American military intervention in northern Mexico and the acquisition of Cuba.
On a broad basis, one way to think about Ouseley’s reliability is to consider the totality of his record as a career diplomat before arriving in Washington during the fall of 1857. To that point, the only known negative was a murky incident decades earlier that led to his relief from a post in Brazil by the foreign office, an episode in which Ouseley was later found to have been in the right.43 The subsequent willingness of Lord Clarendon to send Ouseley to first Washington and then Central America to resolve the highly sensitive Clayton-Bulwer Treaty impasse — a problem not of Ouseley’s making — appears to indicate that by 1857 he was in good, if not high, standing at the British foreign office. Rumors of his posting to Central America via Washington prompted one New York newspaper to comment that, “… the choice indicates a disposition, on the part of the British Government, to conduct this delicate and protracted negotiation to a peaceful and mutually satisfactory result.” After noting with approval Mrs. Ouseley’s American birth, the paper added, “He has ever since manifesteda steady and intelligent interest in the affairs of this country.”44 From this record it could be argued that there is no reason not to accept Ouseley’s reports as an accurate recording of what President Buchanan told him.
On a more specific level, it should also be noted that the envoy’s account of Buchanan’s views on Mexico and Cuba are consistent with the president’s earlier positions as well as those that he took after the Utah War. Furthermore, Ouseley’s recording of Buchanan’s views on Utah in late November 1857 were not only directionally consistent with those that the president expressed at that time to the Russian ambassador, they closely track the presidential language on this subject that
Minister Stoeckel reportedto his superiors in St. Petersburg. Ouseley’s comments on Buchanan’s deviousness in sending a lessthan-informed General Scott to California, is an accurate reading of Buchanan’s propensity to manipulate situations and people. Another example of such behaviorwas the president’s awareness on December 26 that Thomas L. Kane intended to discuss exodus with Brigham Young without revealing to Kane that any such Mormon flight to Mexico would perhaps be followed by a Buchanan-arranged intervention there. It was such lack of forthrightnessin Buchanan’s year-end dealings with Kane that prompted his wife, Elizabeth, to record in her diary that Thomas’s brother, Pat, and several former friends of Buchanan considered the president’s conduct to be what they termed “Buck all over.”45
This political cartoon from 1854 highlights diplomat James Buchananʼs role in drafting the Ostend Manifesto which called for the acquisition of slaveholding Cuba by the United States.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Yet, if Ouseley is to be considered an accurate source, it must be with the caveat that he was a self-interested one. The envoy’s dispatches to Lord Clarendon are garnished with frequent recitations of his valuable access to Buchanan, especially vis-á-vis that of his presumably less-connected Washington rival, Lord Napier. So heavily did Ouseley wield the trowel of self promotion that in London Benjamin Moran, the prickly but powerful secretary of the American legation and a Buchanan protégé from Pennsylvania, reacted with ridicule to one of Ouseley’s dispatches to which he became privy.46 Moran’s comments may reflect jealousies within the lower level of London’s diplomatic community more than serious flaws in the accuracy of Ouseley’s dispatches. Nonetheless, they should serve as a cautionary note signaling the need for historians to put Ouseley’s observations to the test of healthy skepticism and energetic cross-checking before accepting them without reservation.
Awareness through Ouseley’s dispatches of presidential planning for a secret, complex chain of events designed to start in Utah and end in Cuba raises an important question. Should historians now consider an additional conspiracy theory alongside the several traditional ones that have lamentably shrouded the Utah War’s origins?47 Is it possible that Buchanan initiated the Utah Expedition in March 1857 to advance international expansion — American Manifest Destiny — rather than simply to restore federal authority in Utah? Such an interpretation by conspiracy theorists will almost inevitably arise, with a broader awareness of Ouseley’s dispatches taken together with Buchanan’s reference to territorial acquisitions in his inaugural address and his secret July 17, 1857, treaty instructions for Minister Forsyth. Such a new conspiracy theory would be an unfortunate distraction, and should not gain credence once reawakened fascination with the Buchanan-Ouseley dialogue falls into a broader context.48
The evidence suggests that Buchanan’s long-term pursuits of Mexico and Cuba while intense, were not factors in the Utah Expedition’s origins. At that time — March 1857 — replacing Brigham Young and restoring federal authority were the president’s objectives.49 However, once Buchanan realized in mid-November 1857 that effective Mormon military resistance was a reality and that he would have to reinforce the Utah Expedition, armed confrontation in the Rockies and Great Basin provided a field for manipulation. This opportunity led to presidential fantasies, if not scheming, about California, Utah, northern Mexico, and Cuba. The need to reinforce the Utah Expedition in 1858 provided an opportunity — one that stimulated Buchanan’s more devious instincts. In early 1858 a second front for the war — a large thrust from the Pacific — to force Brigham Young out of Utah and south into Mexico, provided the means to scratch two presidential itches: Buchanan’s “Mormon problem”; and his need to expand the United States to fulfill its Manifest Destiny.
Naturally a scenario of this character also raises questions as to whether a demonstrably devious President Buchanan misled, if not duped, not only General Scott but Thomas L. Kane and Brigham Young as well. It is likely that at Christmas-time 1857, Kane told Buchanan that when he reached the Salt Lake Valley and met with Young, he intended to broach the subject of a mass Mormon exodus from Utah.50 Yet the president apparently chose not to comment on Kane’s plan at that time, thereby allowing Kane to sail west oblivious to the broader Utah-Mexico-Cuba scheme the president would soon confide to Ouseley. If and how Kane and Brigham Young subsequently discussed an exodus is unknown, but less than two weeks after Kane arrived in Salt Lake City on February 25, 1858, Young cryptically informed both Delegate Bernhisel in Washington and the president of the Mormon British Mission in Liverpool that he was continuing to keep his “eyes” on Russian Alaska.51
On March 21, 1858, with a northern route for escaping the Utah Expedition unexpectedly precluded by the recent Indian attack on the Mormon outpost at Fort Limhi, Oregon Territory, Young abruptly announced a change in policy. He would flee and continue to search for elusive oases in western Utah’s White Mountains rather than continue plans to fight the army. The initial destination for thirty-thousand southbound Mormons was Provo, with the location of the ultimate haven undisclosed. This was to be the largest movement of refugees in North America since the removal of Acadians from Nova Scotia after the French and Indian War and of British Loyalists from the U.S. to Canada during the American Revolution. On his return to Philadelphia and Washington in May 1858, Kane told a westbound New York Times reporter whom he encountered on the trail that he believed the Mormons’ destination to be Mexican Sonora.52 It was a region that James Buchanan formally asked the U.S. Senate to sanction seizing six months later in December 1858, albeit without Brigham Young’s help and, as it turned out, without Congress’s either.53
Whether James Buchanan succeeded with such intrigue is one issue; that as president he briefly entertained such plans, and pursued them manipulatively and clandestinely, is another matter. As researchers address anew the linkage between the Utah War and James Buchanan’s foreign scheming, the Utah War may be seen in its true lights. It was a massive armed confrontation with regional (western) and international sweep, rather than an episode narrowly confined to Mormon Utah. In this connection it is well to remember that muchmaligned James Buchanan was not just a parochial Pennsylvania politician. During the Mexican War he had been President Polk’s secretary of state, and under Presidents Jackson and Pierce, Buchanan had been American minister to Russia and Great Britain, respectively.
President Buchanan has been depicted as doddering, passive, indecisive and blundering—especially when matched against a supposedly strategically brilliant Brigham Young. Perhaps this was the president who faltered so disastrously during the secession crisis of 1860-1861, but during the opening year of his administration, James Buchanan was scheming, devious, secretive, manipulative, and — above all else — an interventionist, rather than feckless.54
This 1856 political cartoon portrays James Buchanan and his desire for Cuba—as identified on the lapel of his jacket.
In late March 1857, Thomas L. Kane wrote to Brigham Young to describe Buchanan as “a timorous man,” and only two months earlier Young had confided to Kane the view that, “We are satisfied with the appointment of Buchanan as future President, we believe he will be a friend to the good, that Fillmore was our friend, but Buchanan will not be a whit behind.”55 Both men may have seriously misjudged how keen the presidential appetite for adventure at their expense was and how sharp his teeth could be in pursuing it.
On September 14, 1857, as Brigham Young released his fateful gubernatorial proclamation of martial law in Utah Territory, George Mifflin Dallas, the American minister in London, wrote to Secretary of State Cass to describe the aggressive, acquisitive image in Great Britain and Europe of James Buchanan’s administration. The occasion for this report was diplomatic speculation, including Ouseley’s, that political chaos in Mexico would prompt an attempt by Spain to reassert its sovereignty over that country and that this distraction would, in turn, facilitate American seizure of Cuba. Dallas’s portrait of a United States led by James Buchanan featured an American leader who was neither timid nor benign. From Europe, Buchanan’s America was viewed as an impending avalanche — “a belligerent individual to be encountered wherever there is a muss, and who cannot be put down.”56
Because Sir William Gore Ouseley was not formally accredited by the British government to the United States during 1857-1858, historians of Mormonism and the American West have not associated him with a military campaign in Utah. For the most part, such analysts have been oblivious even to Ouseley’s temporary presence in Washington, let alone its significance. By the same token, diplomatic historians, primarily riveted on the intrigues in foreign chancelleries, have been wholly unaware of the Utah War, if not Mormonism itself. Lost in the process has been an appreciationof the confidential discussions of armed confrontation in Utah and its international linkages that unfolded at a critical juncture between a simpatico British diplomat and a lonely bachelor-president over Cuban cigars and tumblers of Old Monongahela whiskey in James Buchanan’s White House office.57
NOTES
William P. MacKinnon is an independent historian residing in Montecito, California. He is a Fellow and Honorary Life Member of the Utah State Historical Society, and during 2010-2011 was President of the Mormon History Association. He thanks Patricia H. MacKinnon and Ardis E. Parshall of Salt Lake City for their editorial and research help.
1 Buchanan to Clayton, April 17, 1849, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, included in John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence. 12 vols. (New York: Antiquarian Press, Ltd., 1960) 8: 361.
2 William T. Sherman to John Sherman, January [?] 1858. Rachel Sherman Thorndike, ed., The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 64.
3 The Utah War of 1857-1858 was the armed confrontation between the administration of President James Buchanan and the civil-religious leadership of Utah Territory led by Governor Brigham Young, second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was a conflict that pitted Utah’s large, experienced territorial militia (Nauvoo Legion) against nearly one-third of the U.S. Army. The most recent brief description of the war is William P. MacKinnon, “Utah War,” essay in Mormonism, A Historical Encyclopedia, W. Paul Reeve and Ardis E. Parshall, eds. (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2010), 120-22. The most complete narrative and documentary histories of the war are: David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, The Mormon Rebellion: America’s First Civil War, 1857-1858 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2011); Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict 1850-1859 (1960; rpt., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008).
4 Michael Beschloss, “Missile Defense,” review of Neil Sheehan’s A Fiery Peace in a Cold War in New York Times Book Review, October 4, 2009.
5 MacKinnon: “Causes of the Utah War,” The Vedette, Newsletter of the Fort Douglas Military Museum Association (Spring 2007): 3-6; At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 99-137; “And the War Came: James Buchanan, the Utah Expedition, and the Decision to Intervene,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2008): 22-37.
6 Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:113.
7 Cass to Forsyth, July 17, 1857, in Donathon C. Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States: A Search for Alternatives toAnnexation, 1854-1861 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981), 87. See also William Ray Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (Washington: U.S. Department of State and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1939), 234-38.
8 Louis A. Perez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
9 Elbert B. Smith, President Zachary Taylor: The Hero President (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2007), 188; Buchanan to Clayton, April 17, 1849, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 8:361.
10 Buchanan to Soulé, September 26, 1854, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, excerpted in Amos Ettinger Aschbach, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853-1855: A Study in the Cuba Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1932), 347.
11 Buchanan, Soule, and Mason, Memorandum to Marcy, October 18, 1854, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 9:267-73.
12 Buchanan to Marcy, October 31, 1854, ibid., 9: 260-66.
13 MacKinnon, “Sex, Subalterns, and Steptoe: Army Behavior, Mormon Rage, and Utah War Anxieties,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 2008): 227-46.
14 Dodge to Buchanan, September 26, 1857, quoted in Louis Pelzer, Augustus Caesar Dodge: A Study in American Politics (Iowa City: State Historical Society of Iowa, 1909), 228-29. When Congress reconvened in early December 1857 after a nine-month recess, it was in an accusatory, finger-pointing mood since during the previous spring it had neither been consulted nor involved in the now troubled Utah Expedition. At this point Congress was not yet aware of Buchanan’s treaty instructions to Forsyth in Mexico City.
15 For the origins of Kane’s 1858 mission to Utah and his prefatory Washington meetings with Buchanan in early November and late December 1857, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 405-13, 485-87, 494-512.
16 For the Utah War roles of Van Dyke and Tyler, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 39, 122-25, 410, 479-80, 485-87, 494-98, 505-06; and 122-24 and 132, respectively.
17 Buchanan to Fallon, December 14, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:165; also James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For a description of Fallon and how he went about his ultimately unsuccessful negotiations, see Sarah Agnes Wallace and Frances Elma Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865. 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 1:209, 278, 280, entries for December 31, 1857, March 27 and 31, 1858.
18 Buchanan’s secretary-nephew described his orderly but circumscribed office routine in James Buchanan Henry, “Biographical Sketch,” Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 12: 323-27.
19 Bernhisel’s reports are in the Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City. For his ambivalence about contact with Buchanan see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 120-21.
20 Ibid., 441-44; Gene A. Sessions and Stephen W. Stathis, “The Mormon Invasion of Russian America: Dynamics of a Potent Myth,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (Winter 1977): 22-43.
21 For biographical information about Ouseley and the origins and dynamics of his relationship with Buchanan see “William Gore Ouseley,” essay in Wikipedia , http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/William_Gore_Ouseley (accessed, March 7, 2011); James J. and Patience P. Barnes, eds., Private and Confidential: Letters from British Ministers in Washington to the Foreign Secretaries in London, 1844-67 (Selinsgrove, PA.: Susquehanna University Press, 1993), 182-94. Also relevant with respect to the president’s relationship with Ouseley’s superior in London is Frederick Moore Binder, “James Buchanan and the Earl of Clarendon: An Uncertain Relationship,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 6 (July 1995): 323-41.
22 Wallace and Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865, 1:305-06, entry for May 4, 1858.
23 Buchanan, Memorandum of a Conversation with Lord Napier, October 19, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan 10:124-26.
24 Virginia Clay-Clopton and Ada Sterling, ed., A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1905), 134.
25 British diplomats stationed abroad did not feel free to send such non-routine, often-personal correspondence to the secretary of state for foreign affairs (in this case Lord Clarendon) without an explicit invitation by him to do so. Buchanan, from his diplomatic days in London, adopted the British practice of labeling his most sensitive correspondence “Private & Confidential” as with his December 14, 1857, letter to Christopher Fallon about acquiring Cuba discussed above.
26 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 29-30.
27 The author thanks the Earl of Clarendon and Mr. Collin Harris, Superintendent, Department of Special Collections Reading Rooms, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, for access to and a photocopy of these holograph materials. For convenience, they are presented here as drawn from Barnes and Barnes, Private and Confidential, 182-94 rather than from the originals in what Bodleian Library designates the “Clarendon Deposit.” At the Bodleian, the original dispatches of January 23 and February 15, 1858, are catalogued as MS Clar. dep.c. 83, fols. 371-74 and 385-88, respectively.
28 Buchanan often used Harriet Lane to facilitate his interpersonal manipulations.
29 Here Ouseley reports a reaction by Buchanan to press speculation of a Mormon mass exodus to the Pacific Coast in language consistent with that attritubed to the president in reporting two months earlier by Stoeckel to the Russian foreign minister following his meeting with Buchanan about the same rumor. Buchanan’s independently recorded comments to Stoeckel give credibility to Ouseley’s reporting of the same subject to Clarendon. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 442.
30 Ibid., 107. Since March 1857, Buchanan had feared that a full public awareness of inflammatory language from Mormon leaders would unleash an uncontrollable, violent public backlash, especially (but not exclusively) from California, where some, but certainly not all, residents still harbored resentment over their treatment while migrating through Utah. For perceptions by transients of ill-treatment in Utah see David L. Bigler, ed., A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Tanner Trust Fund, 2001). By January 1858, rage in California over the Mountain Meadows massacre had added to this volatility.
31 Bernhisel to Young, January 18, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 61, Fd 2 (Reel 71), LDS Church History Library.. The envoy also described the extent to which prolonged congressional obstinence over funding for an expanded Utah Expedition was unwittingly threatening the viability of this presidential scheme.
32 For a discussion of Gen. Winfield Scott’s scheduled departure for the Pacific Coast to organize a move against Brigham Young from California and Oregon – a thrust to be undertaken over Scott’s objections and at the insistence of Buchanan and Sec. of War Floyd – see MacKinnon, “Buchanan’s Thrust from the Pacific: The Utah War’s Ill-Fated Second Front,” Journal of Mormon History 34 (Fall 2008): 226-60; reprinted with revisions in The California Territorial Quarterly 82 (Summer 2010): 4-27. Scott abruptly canceled his trip and on February 4, 1858 – the literal eve of his scheduled departure – so notified Col. Albert Sidney Johnston without explanation other than to say that there would be no move against Utah from the Pacific. In 2007, when the author first drafted this study of a second front for the Utah War, he was no more aware of the Ouseley-Buchanan discussions than had been Gen. Scott a hundred and fifty years earlier.
33 Emphasis added. As early as November 24, 1857, in the midst of administration plans to reinforce the Utah Expedition, Ouseley had reported to Clarendon, after meeting with Buchanan, “the key in short to his whole system of govt. negotiations & foreign policy is to be found in the one absorbing long-cherished plan of the later years of his life – viz., the acquisition of Cuba during the term of his own Presidency” [emphasis Ouseley’s].
34 For a discussion of the extent to which Gen. Scott was often unaware of what troop movements President Buchanan and Secretary Floyd were ordering during the Utah War, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 95-97, 129-33.
35 When Buchanan initiated the Utah Expedition during the spring of 1857, Congress had just adjourned. Ouseley here anticipates that Buchanan would again undertake a military intervention, this time in northern Mexico, without the complexity of congressional involvement.
36 For press speculation that Buchanan and Delegate Bernhisel were engaged in buy-out discussions and Bernhisel’s cryptic signal to Brigham Young that he was involved in some such sort of highly secret gambit to resolve the Utah War, see “Important from Washington,” Dispatch, New York Herald, February 2, 1858, 4/5; Bernhisel to Young, June 29, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 61, Fd 2 (Reel 71), LDS Church History Library.
37 For the interest of Mormon leaders, including Joseph Smith, in this area during the Nauvoo period, see Ronald K. Esplin, “’A Place Prepared’: Joseph, Brigham and the Quest for Promised Refuge in the West,” Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982): 85-111; J.B. Munro, “Mormon Colonization Scheme for Vancouver Island,” Washington Historical Quarterly 25 (1934): 278-85; Richard Bennett and Arran Jewsbury, “The Lion and the Emperor: The Mormons, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Vancouver Island, 18461858,” BC Studies 128 (Winter 2000/2001): 37-62. Napier to Clarendon, November 16, 1857, Foreign Office, Public Record Office (National Archives), London; copy in Manuscript Division, U.S. Library of Congress; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 441.
38 Susan Dallas, ed., Diary of George Mifflin Dallas; while United States Minister to Russia 1837-1839, and to England 1857 to 1861 (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1892), 241, entry for February 18, 1858.
39 Barnes and Barnes, Private and Confidential, 193.
40 Olliff, Reforma Mexico and the United States, 113.
41 The Move South was the exodus ordered by Brigham Young of an estimated thirty-thousand Mormon refugees from northern Utah to a holding pattern in Provo during April-June 1858 in anticipation of the Utah Expedition’s entrance into the Salt Lake Valley once it had received supplies, remounts, and reinforcements from Kansas, New Mexico, and possibly even California.
42 Private “Utah,” Letter of May 28, 1858, to the Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, June 8, 1858, published in Harold D. Langley, ed., To Utah with the Dragoons and Glimpses of Life in Arizona and California 1858-1859 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), 20-21. The author’s research in the Mexican governmental archives for 1857-1858 is not yet complete. A partial survey of this material yields a diplomatic picture as chaotic as the country’s political instability. The Mexican legation in Washington episodically reported on Mormon affairs simply by relaying American press reports. There are no signs of Mexican diplomatic interfaces with President Buchanan of the type enjoyed by the ministers of Great Britain and Russia discussed above.
43 “William Gore Ouseley,” essay in Wikipedia.
44 “A Special Minister to be Appointed for the United States,” New York Times, October 29, 1857.
45 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 508.
46 Wallace and Gillespie, eds., The Journal of Benjamin Moran, 1857-1865, 1:420, entry for September 2, 1858.
47 The longstanding conspiracy theories – none substantiated – by which Buchanan supposedly launched the Utah Expedition to enrich the army’s freighting firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell; distract the nation from civil conflict in “Bleeding Kansas”; or respond to a proto-Confederate cabal in his cabinet seeking to weaken the federal government by draining the Treasury and scattering its army to the West, are discussed in MacKinnon, “125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857-58,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52 (Summer 1984): 212-30; Richard D. Poll and MacKinnon, “Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered,” Journal of Mormon History 20 (Fall 1994): 16-44. When the author published these studies he was unaware of the Ouseley dispatches, which did not surface until publication of the Barnes’s book Private and Confidential in 1993.
48 Potentially adding fuel to such an unsupportable conspiracy theory is the coincidence by which the man whom Buchanan sent out in late 1858 as U.S. minister to Spain was William Preston of Louisville, Kentucky,Col. Albert Sidney Johnston’s father-in-law and Secretary of War Floyd’s cousin. Preston’s charge was to succeed where Fallon had failed in acquiring Cuba, a mission in which he too was unsuccessful.
49 MacKinnon, “And the War Came,” 22-37; At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 99-135.
50 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 501-03.
51 Young to Bernhisel and Young to Asa Calkin, both March 5, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, Box 60, Fd 7 (Reel 70) and Box 18, Fd 10 (Reel 26), respectively, LDS Church History Library.
52 Richard D. Poll, “The Move South,” BYU Studies 29 (Fall 1989): 65-88. The ultimate destination of this migration has never been established. Occasionally Young hinted that Sonora was to be the targeted haven, but he never said so clearly, and movement toward such a destination would have been highly problematic, if not seemingly impossible. In late May 1858, an eastbound Kane encountered James W. Simonton, a New York Times reporter, at Sweetwater Bridge, Nebraska Territory, and gave him the impression that Young, whom he had just left, was heading for Sonora. “The Mormons. Colonel Kane’s Statement on the Way Home from Salt Lake City.” Dispatch of May 23, 1858 by “S” [Simonton], New York Times, June 25, 1858. Later, an anonymous letter-writer in Washington speculated, “… is it not more than probable that KANE was first sent out [to Utah] by the Administration, with the hope that the Mormon emigration south might contribute towards the acquisition of Sonora and Chihuahua?” Anonymous, Letter, July 19, 1858, New York Times, July 20, 1858, 1/2. Unknown at this time, of course, was Kane’s counsel in the 1870s that Young should consider a mass exodus to Mexico in response to tightening of federal enforcement of the polygamy statutes.
53 Buchanan, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” December 6, 1858, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, 10: 256.
54 The most recent examination of Buchanan’s temperament, administrative style, and actions as president is Michael J. Birker and John W. Quist, eds., James Buchanan and the Coming of the Civil War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming). One of the chapters included in this volume is William P. MacKinnon“Prelude to Armageddon: James Buchanan, Brigham Young, and a President’s Initiation to Bloodshed.”
55 Kane to Young, ca. late March 1857, Thomas L. Kane Papers, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California; Young to Kane, January 7, 1857, Brigham Young Letterpress copybook transcriptions, 1974-78
(“Romney transcripts”), MS 2736, vol. 3, 273-77, LDS Church History Library. Both letters may also be found in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 115 and 74-76. Ironically, Young would later suggest to Kane (without knowing of Utah’s place in Buchanan’s 1858 schemes) that the American Civil War could be halted through an international diversion “to annex Mexico to the United States and then go on and annex the Central States of [Latin] America, Cuba—all the West India Islands—and Canada? What can we do to help you in this matter?” Young to Kane, September 21, 1861, Brigham Young Papers, CR1234/1, Box 19, Fd16 (Reel 28), LDS Church History Library.
56 Dallas, Dispatch (#146) to Cass, September 14, 1857, A Series of Letters from London 1:202-03.
57 So alarmed was the British government over the vast but unpredictable implications of a possible army-driven, mass Mormon exodus from Utah toward the Pacific coast, it instructed the Royal Navy “to afford the Assistance of H[her] M[ajesty’s] Ships for the prevention of a violent & forcible landing of the Mormons, in the event of your being called upon to do so by HM Consul General [in Honolulu] as requested by the [Kingdom of Hawaii’s] Secretary of State.” See “Contemplated Emigration of Mormons from Utah to the Sandwich [Hawaiian] Islands.” Memo from British under secretary of state for foreign affairs, June 8, 1858, found in Rear-Admiral Robert L. Baines, commander Pacific station (Peru), to secretary of Admiralty board (London), July 22, 1858; ADM 1 (Correspondence and Papers of the Admiralty, and Ministry of Defence, Navy Dept.), Box 5694, Bundle Y, Item 156, British National Archives, Kew.
