MAC K I N N O N
Col. Kane, on Monday night, before the Historical Society, delivered a lecture on the “Executive of Utah.” From the title, many supposed that the lecture would be an exposition of the character of Brigham Young, and the events of the Mormon War. It proved however, to be an Eulogium of Governor Cumming, whom Col. Kane characterized as the bravest man that America had yet produced. —New York Evening Express, March 22, 1859
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Saving the Governor’s Bacon: Thomas L. Kane’s Political Defense of Alfred Cumming, 1859
323 On June 26, 1858, the day Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston’s Utah Expedition marched triumphantly through Salt Lake City, the Utah War began to change from an active military campaign involving nearly one-third of the US Army to a territorial-federal standoff of quite different character. After a year of armed confrontation, guerrilla tactics, and atrocities, the campaign morphed into a decades-long contest of wills between civilians resembling the soon-to-follow period of Reconstruction in the American South.1 What began to unfold in Utah during June 1858 under Brigham Young’s guidance was a continuum of nonmilitary but contentious legal, political, and journalistic maneuvering that minimized further bloodshed but damaged the territory’s repeated bids for statehood and equality until 1896. This article’s purpose is to shed light on this transformation from armed confrontation to prolonged political contest by describing an important but now little-known incident early in Utah’s reconstruction: Thomas L. Kane’s high profile, public defense of a beleaguered Governor Alfred Cumming in March 1859, the eve of his anticipated removal from office by President James Buchanan. That Kane’s gambit played out at an improbable location far from Utah—before a lectern at the New-York Historical Society—while deftly pitting himself against the nation’s chief executive, adds to the incident’s complexity and color. So too for the behind-the-scenes involvement of George Q. Cannon, a powerful leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
