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Saving the Governor’s Bacon
Saving the Governor’s Bacon: Thomas L. Kane’s Political Defense of Alfred Cumming, 1859
BY WILLIAM P. MACKINNON
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
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.
“Distinguished Americans, at a meeting of the New York Historical Society,” ca. 1854. In March 1859, Thomas L. Kane spoke before a “fashionable audience” at the same institution; no depiction exists of Kane’s talk, but this image shows a likely scene amidst the society’s Victorian Gothic architecture. Engraved by T. Doney. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-01061.
With the recent flow of scholarship about the Utah War of 1857–1858 and Kane’s intervention to mediate its resolution, there is no need to describe Kane’s travels or, for that matter, his complex maneuverings with President Young, Governor Cumming, and Colonel Johnston at Salt Lake City and Fort Bridger except to say that Kane did not by himself bring an end to the conflict. 2 However, he did make a signal contribution to its resolution by first renewing his relationship with Young and then winning Cumming’s trust at Fort Bridger and convincing him to travel to Salt Lake City during April 1858 without an army escort. There, standing alone with Kane, Cumming claimed the governorship the Philadelphian had helped persuade Young to relinquish. He did so while 30,000 Latter-day Saints evacuated the city and northern Utah at Young’s direction to flee south toward an undisclosed haven. No one other than Kane could have managed Cumming’s ascension; it was he who set in place the foundation for the peace process soon to follow.
In effect, without further bloodshed, Kane set the stage for the termination of the war’s military stage through other players once he returned east during May and June after learning belatedly of his father’s death on February 21. While Kane crossed the Great Plains toward home, two official peace commissioners appointed by Buchanan without Kane’s awareness arrived in Salt Lake City. They carried a proposition for Young and the territory’s entire population to consider: agree to full restoration of federal authority (including acceptance of Buchanan political appointees like Cumming) and receive in return a blanket presidential pardon for any treasonable offenses committed. It was a take-it-or-leave-it proffer accompanied by an informal understanding that the Utah Expedition would then enter the Salt
Lake Valley without further contest and that its troops would camp some distance from Utah’s major towns. Arguing with the commissioners that the Latter-day Saints had done nothing to necessitate such a pardon, Young nonetheless agreed to its conditions on June 12, although in somewhat idiosyncratic language: “If a man comes from the moon and says he will pardon me for kicking him in the moon yesterday, I don’t care about it. I’ll accept of his pardon, it don’t affect me one way or the other.” 3 The result was the Utah Expedition’s peaceful march through Salt Lake City on June 26, 1858, and subsequent establishment of its headquarters at Camp Floyd in Cedar Valley forty miles to the southwest. LDS refugees then returned to their homes from what came to be called the Move South.
At about the same time these events played out in Salt Lake City, Kane reached Philadelphia, paused for a day, and then hurtled off to Washington. There he met with Buchanan and his cabinet in a futile effort to convince them to adopt his recommendations for forging amicable relations between the federal government and territory of Utah. With this failure, Kane returned home from Washington near the end of June, couriered a message to Young that “Buchanan’s is certainly the most corrupt administration [I have] ever had to deal with,” and collapsed from one of the many illnesses that had plagued him throughout his Utah mission. 4 He vowed to withdraw from further involvement in Mormon affairs.
After traveling more than 6,000 miles by ocean steamer, wagon, horseback, riverboat, and rail, Kane found himself unemployed, fatherless, mired in debt, broken in health, disillusioned with religion, and somewhat at odds with a family that did not agree with or even understand the why of what he had done in Utah. Kane descended into depression not unlike the mood then besetting Young in the self-imposed isolation of the Lion House. 5
Kane and Young, Postwar
Fortunately for Alfred Cumming and the Latter-day Saints, both Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane were resilient. Young had his unshakeable religious faith to sustain him and an enormous sense of responsibility for the
wellbeing of the Latter-day Saints. Kane had the love and encouragement of both his wife and her father, William Wood, to help him regain his equilibrium. Although Wood had sustained serious business reverses during the Panic of 1857, he was a staunch Protestant and optimist. He helped to pull Thomas from his low point with a perceptive reminder of both his accomplishments and the courage he had mustered to face adversity in the West on a grand scale. 6
During the late summer of 1858 Kane began to lay plans to support himself by developing his family’s timber holdings in western Pennsylvania and, despite his vow to disengage from Mormon affairs, resumed dispensing advice to Young. He counseled Young to bide his time while avoiding provocative language and actions, work patiently to have as much as possible of the army removed from Utah, continue to seek statehood, and do all that he could to ensure that Cumming remained the territory’s governor. 7
Young, in turn, emerged from depression by executing the nonmilitary strategy that he had formulated in the spring of 1858 while anticipating the army’s approach to Salt Lake City. The extent to which Young confided to Kane the substance of this nonmilitary plan for dealing with the US government during Utah’s postwar “reconstruction” is unclear, although recent scholarship reveals that on July 21, 1858, Young wrote Kane an encrypted message containing a distilled description of his principal priorities. 8 As close as the two men were, there were limits to Young’s willingness, if not ability, to communicate his thoughts and decision-making process to Kane and vice versa. Determining where these lines of demarcation lay is open to future research and analysis. 9
What started to unfold, beginning with Cumming’s arrival with Kane in Salt Lake City on April 12, was the array of thrusts conceived and directed by Young as described elsewhere. 10 As many, if not all, of these nonviolent initiatives began to come on-stream, they involved Kane in the role of long-distance advisor to Young and occasionally as active participant or operative. For this reason, as Young sent two of his most trusted agents east to begin new assignments during the late summer of 1858, he pointedly instructed Horace S. Eldredge and George Q. Cannon to seek out Kane in Philadelphia and place themselves under his direction. Much as directors of intelligence have done over the centuries, Young extolled the merits of discretion, deception, and secrecy. 11
As early as June 1858, Kane was actively involved in the component of Young’s strategy that called for influencing New York’s press. While in Washington that month he also continued an effort begun while in Utah on his own initiative. Independent of Young, Kane began selling to Cumming, Buchanan, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, and selected newspaper editors the notion that there was a war-peace split atop the Mormon hierarchy, with Young leading the latter faction. By implication, with a trustworthy Young at the new governor’s elbow, it would be safe for the administration to withdraw federal troops from Utah to prosecute Indian campaigns elsewhere in the West. 12
Presidential Ingratitude
While these nonviolent elements of war by other means percolated in Utah, Kane’s view of the president and his administration turned negative in Philadelphia. His unsuccessful June trip to Washington was disillusioning, and the president’s insincere offer of a minor and probably undeliverable overseas patronage appointment in the Kingdom of Naples added to his disgust. Elizabeth Kane characterized the putative appointment to Naples, declined by Thomas, as hush money.
Even more galling to Kane and his family was the fact Buchanan chose not to arrange for Tom’s reemployment in the still-open court clerkship he had resigned to go to Utah. On July 15, that clerkship, after tentatively being tendered to Buchanan’s nephew, went to another political favorite, as had a few months earlier the judgeship in the same court vacated by the death of John K. Kane. 13
During his June visit to the Executive Mansion, Kane had told the president he did not intend to seek public recognition for his efforts to mediate the Utah War. As Elizabeth Kane saw it, her husband “felt as if ‘glory of men’ would sully the offering he had made to God.
He felt, very humbly and yet very proudly that God had accepted him as a[n] instrument. He could not have done what he did through his own strength alone. Let those who wanted it have the credit” (like Buchanan and his official commissioners) “—this feeling was enough for him.” Elizabeth expressed with some disdain that Kane had done the work, but Buchanan received the accolades. 14 The president took Kane at his word, paying little attention to him thereafter. Kane encouraged Buchanan’s neglect by writing him on July 20 to express outrage that a Philadelphia newspaper had written that “Col. Thomas Kane will, when the proper opportunity arrives, state his case to the people, and show that he did not go to Utah without full authority, and also that the American army could never have entered Salt Lake City without his previous efforts in favor of peace.” Kane told Buchanan he would continue to keep his “seclusion,” was not medically able to vacation with him at Bedford Springs, “and, as soon as I am strong enough, I shall run away and hide myself among the mountains of Elk County.” 15
Cumming’s Vulnerability and Kane’s Image Management
If during the early summer of 1858 Brigham Young and Thomas Kane were ailing medically, Alfred Cumming was politically vulnerable. As Kane lay abed in mid-July, too weak to write, he dictated a letter of warning and support for Cumming to be couriered west by his Nauvoo Legion bodyguard, Major Howard Egan. The letter Egan carried when he left Philadelphia on July 19 was intended to bolster Cumming’s morale. Kane wrote it to address a complaint at the heart of an earlier letter Mrs. Cumming had written him (with her husband’s knowledge) as the army approached Salt Lake City on June 25. In this letter Elizabeth Cumming fumed that the cadre of New York newspaper reporters in town were ignoring the substantial contributions of Alfred and Kane to the war’s peaceful resolution.
Instead, they chose to heap praise on Buchanan’s two peace commissioners, Lazarus W. Powell of Kentucky and Ben McCulloch of Texas. 16 For historians, Kane’s letter to Cumming, written in late July 1858, provides a glimpse of not only his loyalty to the governor but insight into the personal sacrifices he had been making on behalf of Latter-day Saints:
In assuring Cumming that he would before long “see justice done,” Kane had in mind developing more fully the foundation for his postwar strategy for Utah—keeping a simpatico, non-Mormon Cumming in the governor’s chair by convincing the Buchanan administration and the American public that the new governor was a man of high character, sound judgment, and great courage. The notion of a courageous Cumming was to be grounded in his tenacity in traveling to Salt Lake City in harsh weather and terrain without a military escort to claim his office in the face of likely Mormon opposition. Although such a heroic image was a gilding of the lily, it was not wholly inaccurate.
In many respects, the daunting Fort Bridger– Salt Lake trek was as much Kane’s accomplishment as Cumming’s. Almost singlehandedly Kane managed to transport an unfit, fearful man across more than a hundred miles of deep snow, mountains, unbridged rivers, and canyons, while concerned that Mormons, Indians, and camp followers from Fort Bridger posed a threat. 20 To Kane it was only justice to bring Cumming’s arduous trail experience to the nation’s attention in discussing his suitability for office. In the process, Kane strayed into rhetorical excesses that risked his own credibility.
As with the war-peace myth, Kane created the embryo of this heroic image while still in Utah, especially in the dispatches he wrote to Buchanan. On April 4, the eve of his departure for Salt Lake City with Cumming, Kane wrote a letter about the governor to his father who, without Thomas’s awareness, had died on February 21. In all likelihood the son’s intent was that Judge Kane pass this note to Buchanan as he had done with his earlier letters. The note’s praise for Cumming—a virtual canonization—would set the stage for Kane’s defense in New York twelve months later. 21
Because the officers and troops of the Utah Expedition viewed the new governor as decidedly unheroic and feared that he and Kane might settle the conflict while depriving them of military glory, they pushed back on Kane’s efforts to burnish Cumming’s image. Soldiers and their civilian camp followers relieved the boredom of winter quarters by debating whether Cumming was a courageous public servant doing his duty or what was then called a humbug. On April 6, Major Fitz John Porter, Johnston’s adjutant and tent mate, journalized skeptically about Kane’s maneuvering on Cumming’s behalf: “I hear today that Gov. C. went to Salt Lake, contrary to the advice of Col. Kane, and that he has given the impression that great risk is run by going. . . . Too late Governor to give the impression you are heroic. You run no more risk in going—if as you said you were invited— than I do staying here—unless injured by outsiders. To give this impression Mr. Kane you strive to hide your game—but no use—it is seen through.” 22
On April 21 Elizabeth Cumming wrote to Alfred in Salt Lake to warn him of the swelling criticism in camp: “All the floating rumors against you for the last fortnight, I had hoped were only the result of a disappointment on the part of certain persons, who had hoped . . . for a chance of promotion if a war were to take place, which hope would be destroyed if you succeeded in peaceably establishing your government. But they have increased in intensity—& now I am convinced there is a settled purpose to misrepresent you at Washington. I have heard too much from too many different sources to doubt any longer.” 23 Kane was aware of the controversy thus triggered in Utah, but he pressed on to stoke this fabricated image for the new governor, doing so even after returning east. This campaign began during his visit to Buchanan during the third week of June.
While in the capital Kane gave an interview to Buchanan’s political organ, the Washington Union. The result was an editorial headed “Gov. Cumming and His Movements in Utah,” in which the newspaper reported, “We have the distinct authority of Col. Kane for saying that Gov. Cumming resolved to enter Salt Lake City in the Spring without having made any arrangement, through Colonel Kane or otherwise, in reference to his visit. It was Governor Cumming’s intention, last Winter, to have separated himself from the army, and to go to the Mormon capital. Not only, then, does it appear that Governor C. acted with great energy.” Using Kane’s perceptions as a source, the Union’s editor described Cumming in laudatory terms as a person displaying “bold, fearless language” under pressure, “a man of a large heart and commanding intellect.” The newspaper concluded this piece with the assurance, “We regard it as fortunate that one so intelligent, firm, and sagacious as Governor Cumming is charged with the delicate duty of administering the Government of the Mormon people.” 24
Cumming would need all the help he could get. By the time the Utah Expedition marched into Salt Lake City, his jurisdictional conflicts and feuds with Johnston, as well as his growing emotional dependence on Young, were alarming the small group of non-Mormons in Utah, the military officers, and the handful of New York war correspondents accompanying them. Among the troops in the field, Buchanan’s pardon was widely viewed as a betrayal by out-oftouch or corrupt politicians. When it became known that the new governor had personally transmitted to Buchanan a petition signed by Young and others demanding the recall of virtually every federal political appointee in Utah, indignation grew. The result was an eastward flow of personal letters from army officers and press dispatches questioning Cumming’s suitability for his position, especially in matters of evenhandedness. There were pointed calls for his removal. 25
There was also damaging ridicule of the governor’s obesity and drinking habits. Discussion of the governor’s undignified appearance, while unseemly in a twenty-first-century context, began to circulate among the Latter-day Saints immediately after his arrival in Salt Lake City on April 12, 1858. At age fifty-six, Young was becoming portly, but Cumming, a year younger, was much more so. Apostle George A. Smith, a heavy man in his own right, initially had mixed reactions: “G. A. S.’s first impression when he saw Cumming was that he was a toper [drinker], but on examining him with his glasses he concluded he was a moderate drinker and a hearty eater, he was dressed in black, ruddy face & grey hairs, his head was small round the top, would think holds more chops than brains, probably weighs about 240 pounds.” Eight months later, Smith downgraded his view: “Gov. Cumming is tub built, so that he seldom can get liquor enough aboard but that he can carry it. At times, he may not be inaptly compared to a whiskey barrel in the morning, and a barrel of whiskey at night; his memory is frequently at fault in consequence of his inebriety.” 26
A rare image of Alfred Cumming, made during Blackfoot treaty talks along Montana’s Missouri River while he was a regional superintendent of Indian affairs. Pencil sketch by Gustavus Sohon. Courtesy of Washington State Historical Society.
Hannah Keziah Clapp interviewed the governor while passing through Salt Lake City soon after the Utah War. Wearing bloomers and sporting a revolver, the formidable Clapp took Cumming’s measure and bluntly labeled him “a superannuated, brandy-soaked, Buchanan Democrat.” In early July 1858 an unidentified non-Mormon resident of Salt Lake City complained to the New York Times that “the common epithet applied by Mormons to Gov. Cumming is ‘old swill tub’ and they boast of having him constantly intoxicated . . . such I feel grieved to hear is the way they are able to speak of a man like Gov. Cumming.” In early August the Times ran a dispatch from its Utah correspondent, who described the governor as “naturally excitable, and notoriously gets steam up to an alarming point over the whisky-jug. He is not the man for the position, and should be replaced forthwith by some one who will command respect for himself and so be better able to exact respect for the Government he represents. He is, withal, vain as a boy of 13, and offensively imagines himself the embodiment of all that is great and grand.” Another writer’s supposedly private complaints branded Cumming “our corpulent Governor” and “almost insane” as they leaked into the pages of the St. Louis Democrat and then, by telegraph, to the New York Times and other newspapers throughout the country. 27
Comments about Cumming’s alcohol intake rippled eastward along the Oregon Trail by word of mouth, titillating even the rough-hewn army reinforcements marching to Utah, a group not known for its temperance. Although he had never seen Cumming, did not know how to spell his name, and was hundreds of miles from Utah, Captain Lafayette McLaws of the Seventh US Infantry, a fellow Georgian, felt free to record that “Mormons (Brigham Young) & Gov. Cummings friendly. . . . Gov. Cummins regarded as Mormon & continually drunk.” 28
In a year-end letter to his business agent in St. Louis, Young commented that “the Governor though by not any means an exception to this rule [of drinking] is more compes mentus,” non compos mentis or of an unsound mind, “while under the influence of alcohol than the most of the others, and although naturally tyrannical and oppressive in his nature, still we do not wish to exchange him at present, for fear we might get a worse one.” 29
Perhaps most surprising among Cumming’s non-Mormon critics was his own nephew and namesake, a West Pointer who was a company commander in the Utah Expedition’s Tenth US Infantry. No doubt burdened by his name, his proximity to his uncle, and his own struggle with alcohol, Captain Cumming wrote to his sister in Georgia, “I do not myself agree with the Gov. on many points, generally resolvable into the single one that I think he puts too much reliance in Mormon faith [trust], but I do think now, as I have ever done, that the general course of his administration is such to promote the best interest of this country and the Government.” 30
As the summer wore on, Kane’s health remained poor, but he was yet convinced that some sort of published essay was needed to support Cumming in the face of mounting criticism in both Utah and the East. On July 21 T. B. H. Stenhouse, a Mormon employee of the New York Herald who had visited Kane, reported to the head of the British Mission, “He has not published anything since his return from Utah. He may yet—I hope so. Should he give another ‘Historical Discourse about the Mormon,’ his second will far exceed his first interesting sketch of their life and sentiments.” 31
Eli K. Price, a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat and close family friend, wrote at about the same time—as if to second Stenhouse’s hopes.
On July 8, Price urged Thomas to write a “narrative” describing what he had seen and done in Utah for “the truth of history.” Price was not pleading for a defense of Cumming but rather was seeking material by which Kane could more broadly establish a proper record of his own noble efforts in Utah while confronting the public accusations swirling about his motivations and actions. Initially, Kane dismissed Price’s plea by commenting, “as concerns ‘History’—I suppose it has always been written by individuals who have had an interest in composing it to suit themselves.” After confessing that he was tempted “to expose a few eminent humbugs and salt some of the leeches who drop off so slowly from their hold upon the Treasury,” he concluded that sensitive matters such as ongoing Mormon affairs required from him “the utmost quietness and circumspection.” 32
As Price’s letters became longer and more insistent about Kane’s debt to history and the likelihood that the Utah controversy was apt to continue rather than fade, Kane’s replies also lengthened, revealing more of the shock over his negative reception by the Buchanan administration and his fears about what might be happening in Utah. In a reply written on July 30, Kane referred to conspiracies and the usual unnamed senior plotters in the leadership circles of Washington and Salt Lake City:
Whether such cabals existed is unknowable from this distance, but that Kane thought they did and shaped his actions accordingly, is both clear and important. 33
Price’s advice that he say something about his Utah experiences to enlighten the public and future historians appears to have moved Kane’s thinking. In August he took a tentative step in the direction of a publicity campaign by sending a letter to the St. Louis Republican, a paper to which he had fed the war-peace myth while passing through that city en route to Philadelphia and Washington in June. Essentially, this piece, run by the Republican and reprinted elsewhere, presented a bogus account of how Cumming happened to travel to Salt Lake City in early April. It cast Kane in the role of passive companion to the energetic, courageous governor rather than what he was—the trip’s instigator and stage manager. The letter ran unsigned and couched in the third person. 34
At about the time this piece appeared in the nation’s newspapers, Kane accelerated his gathering of source material to enable him to speak out with a higher profile. He thought about doing so through a written exposition of what had happened in Utah that would emphasize the positive contributions of Cumming and Young to offset what Kane viewed as unwarranted public credit for Johnston and the president’s peace commissioners. On August 25, Kane began his fact gathering about Cumming by writing to the governor’s older brother, William, in Georgia. Whether Kane was aware of the decades of estrangement between the brothers is unknown, but William responded on September 8 with a warm, rambling letter that advised Kane to leave the subject of defending his brother alone, lest it “brings out at once, the whole swarm of buzzing & stinging things.” Essentially, William told Kane that he knew Alfred better than his own brother did and wished him well: “I am really glad, that the whole decision rests with yourself. Your perfect acquaintance with the subject, & your sentiments towards the party chiefly concerned, are an ample guaranty that the course you adopt, will be such as he would approve.” 35
As Kane envisioned it, the article or essay he intended to write might appear in the fall or after Congress reconvened in early December.
Because of his own ill health and Cumming’s aversion to public (but not private) flattery, Kane deferred the project until the fires of controversy over Cumming’s administration banked up to a more dangerous level. He did not have long to wait. On September 27 the Army of Utah’s quartermaster shared his views with the officer at Secretary of War Floyd’s elbow, Samuel Cooper, the army’s adjutant general: “Judge Eckels left here this morning on his way to Washington, and will give all the news of importance. Affairs in the Territory are not, politically, favorable; and it is doubtful if they can be under present government. The truth is, no one supposes, for a moment that they can be cured or even remedied without an important change in high civil places.” Eckels added to this incendiary atmosphere by taking east with him letters highly critical of Cumming written by Indian agent Garland Hurt and a prominent Mormon apostate named Mr. Vernon. The judge sent this material directly to Secretary Cass when he reached his home in Indiana early in 1859. 36
Young saw things differently, reporting in September to Kane, “Governor Cumming holds an even hand, and appears disposed to see justice extended to Utah, so far as his power and influence can accomplish that object.” With a touch of condescension, Young noted
In late October 1858 Kane and his family returned to Philadelphia from McKean County, Pennsylvania, where they had spent several months in the mountains as Thomas began a new job as agent for a land development company in close proximity to the Kane family’s own substantial holdings of timber. While in western Pennsylvania that summer two developments impacted Kane’s thinking: he continued to receive secret communications from Young about conditions in Utah in the immediate aftermath of the Utah Expedition’s arrival, and he grew restive under the daunting challenge of supporting his family in such an unsophisticated environment. Elizabeth Kane felt otherwise, reveling in their brief freedom distant from the complexities of Kane family life in Philadelphia in the wake of Judge Kane’s death, and the pleasure of at last presiding over her own home.
Upon their return, Thomas’s restlessness played out through thoughts of what he called the “Far West.” When Elizabeth asked him for “a definite plan” for their future, he proposed three options for 1859: buy coal lands in British Columbia’s Fraser River district to fuel Pacific steamers; move to San Bernardino, California, the former Mormon colony, to become vintners and ranchers; or relocate to the Caribbean Coast of Central America to serve as “Protector” for a colony of Latter-day Saints that Thomas hoped Young would agree to establish in Honduras and Nicaragua. Acutely aware that her husband had no other source of income and earlier that year had plunged her and their two toddlers into a precarious living situation to undertake his Utah mission, Elizabeth rejected all three undertakings out of hand, commenting that she did so “rightly.” She countered by reminding Thomas “how happy and contented we were in Elk County.” Undoubtedly a factor in her reaction was her unfamiliarity with the North American West aggravated by her substantial reservations about Mormonism, especially doubts about the reliability and character of Young. 38
James Buchanan, seen here as a candidate for the presidency. Currier lithograph, from a Mathew Brady photograph. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIGpga-00797.
Of Presidential Ducks and Public Humiliation: Catalysts for Reenergizing Kane
On November 19, the day after Thanksgiving, Thomas abruptly left Philadelphia to visit Washington, an absence that disturbed Elizabeth Kane because of the serious illness of their son Elisha. Ostensibly Kane’s purpose in going to the capital was to settle the financial accounts of his late brother, Elisha, with the auditors at the navy department, but while there he twice called at the Executive Mansion in an attempt to see Buchanan. Pleading a full schedule, Buchanan declined to meet with Kane but sent him home bearing two dead canvasback ducks provided by Harriet Lane as a gift and show of respect for Kane’s widowed mother. Kane later explained to Buchanan his motives in trying to see him: “As you must have heard of my calls at the White House during my late brief visit to Washington, I ought to write that I had nothing Mormon on hand to press upon your notice. I have in my table drawer long letters recently received from Salt Lake City from Governor Cumming and the people there which to be sure ‘groan over ins and outs deemed monstrous and most very grievous’ but some of them however cannot afford to wait till Congress meets [in early December] before claiming your (now sufficiently overtasked) attention.” Having said this, Kane went on to reassure the president, “Indeed on the whole the state of things in Utah should furnish the country with cause for most sincere congratulations” and signed the letter as “faithfully your friend and servant.” 39
Before leaving Washington on November 21, a key cabinet officer, attorney general Jeremiah S. Black, engaged Kane in what was truly one of the more bizarre episodes of the Kane-Buchanan relationship—one heretofore unknown to even Kane’s biographers. According to what Thomas later told his wife, Black—acting as Buchanan’s intermediary—offered Kane the presidency of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Party machine (then in disarray). In response, Thomas declined what Elizabeth characterized as Buchanan’s attempt to “tempt” her husband, telling Black “he thought he had now done enough for the country, that he must take care of his health and fortunes—and felt no call to assume the position. His conclusion was that he would keep himself sufficiently in with the Administration to be able to watch their course in Mormon affairs, but not to pledge himself to them.” Kane may have gone so far as to tell the attorney general that with respect to the Latter-day Saints his political views were closely aligned with those of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, Buchanan’s political adversary. It was a disclosure that led both Kanes to conclude that the president “will not mention his [Utah] services in the Message [to Congress] lest they should strengthen a Douglasite.” After making clear in her journal that she viewed all party politics as sordid, Elizabeth commented, “certainly I would not care to have Tom a Mayor, General, Ambassador, Prince, or President, but I would like to have his services recognised in the Message, dearly.” Thomas sent Buchanan a bread-and-butter note thanking him for the ducks. 40
In their disappointment over Thomas’s likely exclusion from Buchanan’s annual message to Congress, the Kanes overlooked the influence of the indefatigable Eli Price, a friend of Buchanan as well as Kane. As Thomas traveled to Washington, Price wrote the president asking him to note Kane’s mission to Utah, “in your Annual Message. He has not felt at liberty to defend himself against misrepresentations, nor can we advise him to do so while it might prejudice any public interest.” With consummate tact, Price explained that he made this suggestion “fearing the pressure of important matters might occasion [your] forgetfulness of what some of us believe it would be a pleasure to you to do.” 41
Thus pressured by Price and aware that Kane had tried to see him with friendly intentions, Buchanan added a single sentence to his December 6, 1858, annual message to Congress, through which he simultaneously recognized and distanced himself from Kane: “I cannot in this connection, refrain from mentioning the valuable services of Colonel Thomas L. Kane, who, from motives of pure benevolence, and without any official character or pecuniary compensation, visited Utah during the last inclement winter for the purpose of contributing to the Pacification of the Territory.” It was a tip of the presidential hat so modest one Philadelphia judge later described it with embarrassment as “concisely stated.” Elizabeth Kane found Buchanan’s acknowledgment skimpy and ungenerous, comparing it unfavorably to Young’s open-handed efforts to reimburse her husband’s travel expenses. It was appreciation of a stripe characterized by Pat Kane and Buchanan’s disaffected friends as “Buck all over.” 42
In her diary, Elizabeth Kane asked, “What is there in statecraft [that] can make it the duty of the Chief Magistrate of as great a nation as this to palm on the world a perverted statement of facts. He actually praises [in his message] the drunken and brutal wretches who he knows gave Tom next to as much trouble as the Mormons.” 43 Buchanan’s one-sentence recognition of his Utah mission, if not his unwillingness to meet with Kane two weeks earlier, seemed to energize Kane. He shook off his vow of anonymity and disengagement from Utah affairs while finding a way to strike back at Buchanan’s ingratitude as well as to protect Alfred Cumming politically. He changed his plan to develop a published essay about the governor to a new format—that of a public lecture to be delivered in a high-profile venue. As T. B. H. Stenhouse had anticipated in July, the model Kane used was a lecture that he had delivered in 1850 in Philadelphia at the prestigious Pennsylvania Historical Society. To ensure a wider public awareness of his views, Kane had thousands of copies of that lecture printed and distributed under the title The Mormons. 44
Within a week of Buchanan’s 1858 message— and perhaps because of it—Kane successfully stimulated an invitation to speak at the New- York Historical Society in Manhattan. His lecture was to be part of a series the society was sponsoring to complete the financing for its elegant new clubhouse.
Having approached Cumming’s brother William in August without obtaining much in the way of usable personal information about the governor, Kane now turned to his other brother, Henry H. Cumming of Augusta, Georgia. Disingenuously implying that he was planning to write a biographical sketch rather than mount a political defense, he described it as “a lecture of which a biographical notice of your brother Gov. Cumming will form an important part.” There is no sign that Henry responded to this request for information, probably assuming that his brother William spoke for both of them when he wrote to Kane the previous September. 45
Kane Strikes Back: The New York Lecture, March 1859
Throughout the winter of 1858–1859, Kane continued to suffer from the ailments that had disabled him after returning from Utah the previous spring. He and Elizabeth agonized over whether his health permitted him to write, let alone deliver, a public address in distant New York, but Thomas insisted that they press on to draft such a talk. The drumbeat of criticism from the various enemies of Cumming, Young, Buchanan, Johnston, and even Kane himself drove him to make the effort. On March 9, 1859, Johnston’s young aide de camp wrote from Camp Floyd to his sister in the District of Columbia, “I don’t know what the Government will do with the Mormons, a more atrocious set of assassins and traitors never existed, and yet they are allowed to exist as a powerful community in our midst Enjoying their heresies, and degrading institutions, alike obnoxious to morality, religion and decency—It is a fearful commentary upon the weakness and corruption of our government. . . . Mormonism has in it little that is not disgusting.” 46
While these events were unfolding in Utah, Kane sent a draft of his lecture across town to his brother Pat seeking his reactions. Eight months earlier Thomas had told his brother that he, above all others, was his closest confidant. Accordingly, when Pat sent his comments on the lecture to his brother on March 12, 1859,
it could be argued that historians owe them special consideration in terms of their likely frankness, if not insight into what Thomas was seeking to accomplish. In brief, Pat Kane was positive about the draft, noting that he saw no reason why it should not be as interesting and entertaining for the audience as his brother hoped it would be. On the other hand, Pat also expressed a major criticism: that the portrait he painted of Cumming’s heroics were one-dimensional without Thomas’s discussion of other players and “antagonism of the Mormons to the Government.” As Pat saw it, his brother was not willing to include such material in the lecture because it would be in his judgment “disclosure for which, as I infer, the time has not come.” In conclusion, Pat stated: “My advice is, given upon imperfect light, to hold yourself in reserve until you can tell candidly and for the future historian, the tale of the Mormon outbreak, from its beginning to its [end].” He never mentioned the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but it is tempting to speculate that this was one of the volatile subjects for which his brother believed the public and national interest were not yet ready. It was the sort of tantalizing innuendo that permeated Thomas’s July 1858 correspondence with Eli Price, wherein he asserted that he alone was capable of determining what the public should know about Utah and what information should find its way into the historical record. What Pat in effect identified in his brother’s draft was Thomas’s affinity for ambiguous, manipulative behavior of the sort that prompted him to argue for years that a peace-loving Young was beset by a warlike opposition atop the Mormon hierarchy without ever identifying a single member of the alleged cabal. 47
Elizabeth Kane served as what she dubbed the couple’s “pen” and “critic.” The day after Pat Kane wrote his critique and a week before the meeting date Thomas had negotiated with the New-York Historical Society—March 21, 1859— Elizabeth noted, “He has been much worried about his lecture but has finally concluded to deliver it. He does not think it will be a creditable literary production, but hopes that it may help to keep Cumming governor of Utah.” 48
Three days before the lecture, George Q. Cannon reported to Young from Philadelphia, “Since I saw him [Kane] previous to [my] starting west he has had another relapse, and has been quite sick, but is now up and about, though by no means strong. He is thinking of delivering a lecture before the Historical Society in New York on Monday next. Though scarcely in a suitable condition to undergo the fatigue, yet he feels that the present condition of things demands it. It will have the effect, doubtless, to strengthen Col. or Gov. Cumming before the country and make his heroism known.” The next day Kane asked Cannon to join him in New York but to go in advance to prearrange for distribution of his talk, the text of which Cannon had not yet seen. It is a reflection of the esteem in which the Latter-day Saints held Kane that Cannon agreed to do so without question. He traveled late at night so as to arrive in Manhattan at 4:00 a.m. on Monday, March 21, the day of the lecture. 49 Remarkably, this may be the first that any of the Latter-day Saint leaders were aware of what Thomas planned to do to help the imperiled Cumming, although the New-York Historical Society had advertised the lecture in the Manhattan newspapers for several days, with the admission tickets priced at fifty cents, and the title announced as “The Executive of Utah.”
Among the possible drivers behind Kane’s anxiety and consequent determination to speak in New York was the fact that the Bostonian Albert G. Browne, Jr., a Cumming critic and the former Utah War correspondent of the New-York Tribune, had embarked on a speaking tour across Massachusetts. Browne’s intent was to explain the war and to recommend solutions for what he considered an intractable Mormon problem.
As Kane struggled in Philadelphia to complete his lecture notes, printers in Boston were preparing to bring out during the third week of February the first installment of a three-part article by which Browne transformed his own lecture into a narrative entitled “The Utah Expedition: Its Causes and Consequences.” This piece— soon the most authoritative and comprehensive non-Mormon account of the war—had been accepted for publication by James Russell Lowell’s Atlantic Monthly, the most prominent magazine in the United States. Kane did not know what to expect from Browne, but a burnishing of Cumming’s gubernatorial image at the New-York Historical Society would serve as a rhetorical backfire to counteract anticipated criticism. 50
Charles Mettam, The New-York Historical Society, 2nd Avenue and 11th Street, New York City, 1855. Here, in 1859, Kane defended Cumming’s effectiveness in order to block his recall by Buchanan and support Young’s postwar strategy for protecting Utah. Courtesy of New-York Historical Society, X.370.
As March 21 dawned, Kane once again rose from a sickbed on behalf of the Latter-day Saints; against his wife’s advice, he entrained for New York accompanied by his physician. Nine years earlier he had been carried into a Philadelphia hall prostrate on an unhinged door serving as a makeshift stretcher to deliver another lecture, “The Mormons.” Kane’s entrance for his New York lecture was hardly this dramatic, but it was clear to attendees that he was ill and making an extraordinary effort to bring them his views of Utah’s political leadership.
One newspaperman reported that Kane spoke “before a respectable audience.” From his lecture’s advertised title, some attendees expected to hear remarks about Young rather than his less famous successor. The same reporter characterized it as “chiefly a narrative of the journey of Gov. Cumming to Salt Lake City, and a panegyric on that officer for his labors and services in the position to which he had been called.” 51
Unlike his famous Philadelphia address on Mormonism, the financially strapped Kane did not publish his New York remarks, and his reading text has disappeared. The address, however, was highly publicized when delivered, and one can reconstruct much of what Kane said from the close coverage by newspaper reporters in his audience, especially that from Horace Greeley’s Tribune. 52 Under the title “Mr. Kane on the Executive of Utah,” the New-York Daily Tribune published the following on March 22, 1859:
Gov. Alfred Cumming, and the part which he had taken in the recent transactions in Utah.
Mr. Kane traced Mr. Cumming’s career as an opulent and philanthropic citizen of Augusta, (Ga.) as a hero of the Mexican war, as Western Superintendent of Indian Affairs—the friend of the red man and the fearless enemy of their spoliators and oppressors—and closed with an account of Mr. Cumming’s conduct in Utah and the circumstances attendant on his journey in advance of the army to Salt Lake City last spring. 53
It has been stated, Mr. Kane said, Gov. Cumming proceeded to Salt Lake assured that his safety was provided for in terms by an agreement with Brigham Young. To this assertion he not only gave an emphatic denial, but he devoted a large portion of his lecture to a narration of facts connected with the Governor’s journey to the valley which he justly said negatived such a supposition. There were few men, he said, who would have dared to expose themselves in the face of so unanimous a protest of opposition as was raised against his taking that step; still fewer who, as he did, would have reposed their confidence in persons against whom was raised so unanimous a voice of warning.
Mr. Kane’s narrative of the real circumstances of Governor Cumming’s journey to Salt Lake was very happy; he showed up admirably the cool intrepidity for which Governor Cumming is of all men one of the most remarkable. At camp there was but one opinion on the subject of his venturing outside the lines. It was not merely that the Mormons had forbidden, under pain of death, all intercourse between our people and theirs. From the time of the first rupture Gov. Cumming was singled out as the especial object of the animosity and invective of the Mormons, rendering him the very bull’s-eye of the target for any of their hundreds of free rifles, who lay out watching the movements of our troops, and prowling out among the windings of the mountains. Had the head men of the Valley been ever so much disposed to spare him, who could guaranty the good conduct of the wild soldiers upon the outposts? A shot from one of these, or any wandering Mormon hunter, might have laid him low before he could attain the main body of the rebel troops.
But, beside this danger and the more ordinary Mormon purlo thrumbos, there was another form which, as things turned out, there was quite as much serious ground for apprehension as any. 54 The whole country lying between the Mormon and American lines was infested by bands of marauding savages—Indian Cowboys and Skinners—who occupied the neutral ground, prepared to rob and murder in the name of either party, as might best promote their purposes. 55 About three weeks before they had succeeded in lifting several hundred head of cattle from the enemy in the name of the United States, killing and scalping two frontiersmen in the course of the transaction. 56 Within ten days they had carried off as many as a hundred horses in another levy of the kind.
Our people had not been exposed as much to the Mormons, or they would no doubt have suffered equally. But the week previous a man having sallied out from camp to look after some matters in the U[i]nta Mountains, some forty of the miscreants, mounted, caught sight of the luckless wight [creature], and chased him to within sight of the sentinels at Bridger.
Before the Governor had proceeded a day’s march upon his journey signs of the presence of the Indians in their vicinity became apparent. To avoid these and the Mormon banditti the Governor was obliged to pass a night of extreme cold among the rocks of the mountains, and was without food or covering for twenty-four hours. His adventures during this time alone would have furnished some autobiographers with materials for a volume. But the only allusion ever made to them by Gov. Cumming, in his report to the gallant Col. Johnston and the Secretary of State [Lewis Cass], is: “Arriving in the vicinity of the Spring, which is on this side of Quaking Asp Hill, after night, Indian campfires were discerned on the rocks overhanging the valley. We proceeded to the spring, and, after disposing of the animals, retired from the trail beyond the mountains. We had reason to congratulate ourselves upon having taken this precaution, as we subsequently ascertained that the country lying below your outposts and ‘Yellow’ [Creek] is infested by hostile renegades and outlaws from various tribes.” 57 “By this brevity on subjects involving self-laudation you recognize the true man,” said Mr. Kane.
The chief fault to be found with this lecture was the omission from the dramatis personae of Col. Thomas L. Kane. This the lecturer apologized for before reading his lecture. He was no public character, he said; he was a very private gentleman, with quite enough to do to take care of his family and limited estate. He had no literary pretensions either, as his audience might shortly say it did not become him to remind them. 58 Least of all was he desirous of prolonging a connexion of his name with the concerns of Utah, which had been, for more than one reason, productive of annoyance to him. He had, therefore, declined all the invitations to lecture which had been so kindly tendered to him, and had accepted that of the New York Historical Society, he would confess, simply for the purpose of doing justice to an individual whose means of usefulness were seriously menaced by the assaults upon his character. He thought it was time for the public to know something about one man in Utah who had enemies in Washington.
George Q. Cannon. From late 1858, he became Brigham Young’s lifelong liaison with Thomas Kane and, soon, a highly influential apostle. Photographed ca. 1862, Cannon appears younger and more heavily bearded than in later, better-known images. Courtesy of Eugene M. and Edna L. Cannon collection, through descendants Jeffrey H. Cannon and Kenneth L. Cannon II.
Being warmed up by his reception, probably, the Colonel also closed with the remark that the considerate kindness of his audience prompted him to be communicative on subjects of greater interest, or to apologize to them for his not doing so. “I know,” he said, “that I have been considered devoid of spirit, because I have not been provoked by personal injustice to divulge the facts of the Mormon insurrection within my knowledge; but I am confident that there are those present capable of appreciating the higher propriety of the course I have marked out for myself, and even thanking me for adhering to it on this occasion. In the United States we all participate in the management of public affairs, and, it is true, have all an equal right to equal knowledge; but we must sometimes leave to the sworn officers of Government the responsibility of disclosing or withholding the facts upon which their opinions are based, and the means by which their ends have been accomplished.” 59
Messrs. Cannon and Stenhouse: Mormon Facilitators
Among those in the audience for Kane’s lecture were two Latter-day Saints who were playing key roles in Young’s postwar campaign to influence the major Atlantic Coast newspapers: George Q. Cannon and T. B. H. Stenhouse. Neither man was involved in Kane’s decision to deliver such a presentation, but both believed with Kane and Young that it was in Utah’s best interest for Cumming to continue serving as the territory’s governor.
To that end Cannon, assisted by Stenhouse, worked at the last minute to ensure that “The Executive of Utah” would receive the widest possible newspaper coverage immediately after Kane delivered this lecture. The means for accomplishing this result were the telegraph facilities available to the Manhattan-based Associated Press (AP). Accordingly, by prearrangement, Cannon delivered a summary of Kane’s text to the AP’s office even before Kane was finished speaking so as to reach the wire service before closing.
Who was George Q. Cannon? At age thirty-two he was an experienced newspaperman. During the Utah War, he had served briefly as an adjutant in the Standing Army of Israel while also working on the Deseret News when that paper relocated to Fillmore, Utah, during the Move South. More importantly, he was ferociously loyal to Young and had earlier demonstrated the capacity to work resourcefully and discreetly at long distances from church headquarters in such locations as Honolulu and San Francisco. From these missions he kept Young well informed on church interests along the Pacific Rim.
When Howard Egan arrived back in Young’s office on August 25, 1858, he delivered Kane’s long, dictated dispatch of July 18 urging Young to push two major priorities: statehood and the consummation of “the arrangement with the Press.” Young responded to this cryptic advice immediately, describing his intent to Kane: “we feel now to move in these mat[t]ers, and also to attend to the opinion of the Press. To promote this object we send our Brother, Geo. Q. Cannon, as you will perceive by a letter of introduction which he will hand you. . . . [H]e is a young man who has been raised with us, and is every way confidential and reliable, and we consider of fair abilities; you can, therefore, place the most implicit confidence in him. He is a printer by trade, and, as you will doubtless remember, conducted the ‘Western Standard’ in San Francisco, therefore has some experience in matters of the Press.” 60 At the same time, in addition to this responsibility with Kane, Young called Cannon to head the church’s organization in the eastern states.
Cannon was a native of Liverpool, England, while his new deputy, Stenhouse, was Scottish by birth. Like Cannon, who was two years younger, Stenhouse was a newspaperman, having worked under Taylor on the church publication in Manhattan, The Mormon. When the advent of the Utah War forced closure of that paper in the fall of 1857, Stenhouse moved next door (literally) to join the staff of the New York Herald. It was the largest-circulation newspaper in North America, owned by James Gordon Bennett, Sr. Bennett, who had hired Stenhouse to be the Herald’s science writer, became his mentor and longtime friend. Stenhouse idolized Kane, writing to the president of the British Mission during the summer of 1858, “for nearly ten years I longed to see him. . . . [T]o his labors, under God, we are saved a war, and the United States an inglorious defeat; for, most assuredly, had Colonel Kane not arrived when he did, the ‘boys’ would have wiped out the army this year, and left neither root nor branch of them.” So adulatory was Stenhouse before Cannon arrived to supplant him in the relationship, Young cautioned him to mute his published comments about Kane lest their excessiveness damage Kane’s credibility. 61
Cannon left three accounts of his reactions to Kane’s lecture: a diary entry recorded within hours of the presentation; several letters to Young written during the ensuing weeks; and a memorial article published by Cannon in a Salt Lake City magazine, The Contributor, soon after Kane’s death twenty-five years later. The differences in these documents provide interesting glimpses of Cumming and Kane in the changing view of Cannon, if not the Latter-day Saints generally.
Perhaps the most intriguing of the three versions presented here comes from the diary, partly because it is the most contemporaneous but also because of the richness of its detail and the fact that it did not become accessible to the public until 2016. Writing on a Sunday and Monday in late March 1859, Cannon noted:
A little over a fortnight later, on April 6 and 14, Cannon report to Young that,
Soon after Kane died in 1883, Cannon memorialized his friend with reminiscences published in Junius Wells’s respected journal for Latter-day Saints, The Contributor. It is a fascinating essay, much of which focused on “The Executive of Utah” as a way of illustrating the deceased’s nobility. At one point Cannon argued that Kane’s lecture “had the effect to turn the scale in Cumming’s favor. President Buchanan relinquished the idea of removing him, and he remained governor until he had served out his full term.” Cannon’s own role and that of Stenhouse all but disappear in this later telling of the story. It is interesting to note that the author substantially mutes Kane’s original emphasis on the heroic character of Cumming’s April 1858 trek from Fort Bridger to Salt Lake City and focuses instead on Kane’s character. By the time The Contributor piece appeared, the Civil War had been fought, and, in its aftermath, there was a negative awareness of Cumming’s allegiance to Georgia and the Confederacy as well as his nephew’s prominent role as a southern brigadier general. Meanwhile Kane’s reputation had risen commensurately; when he resigned his Union Army commission after the battle of Gettysburg, he was a wounded major general—another reason in the 1880s to highlight his contributions to the Utah War’s resolution while minimizing Alfred Cumming’s role. 64
Two years after Cannon’s posthumous tribute to Kane, Edward W. Tullidge, an editor in Salt Lake City, described the same scene from his own sources. He chose to emphasize the role of Cannon and Stenhouse (without names), and, like Cannon’s 1884 article, minimized Kane’s original focus on the courageousness of Cumming’s trek. Unlike Cannon, Tullidge emphasized Kane’s notion of a war-peace faction among the Latter-day Saints and the nonmonolithic character of their church: “In that audience were two Mormon elders listening eagerly for a sentence that might help ‘the cause’ in the West. By previous arrangement the agent of the Associated Press was to be furnished with a notice of the lecture, and thus a dispatch next morning was read everywhere throughout the Union to the effect that there was a division among the Mormons, that some were eager for strife, others for peace, but that Brigham Young was on the side of peace and order, and was laboring to control his fiery brethren.” 65
Presidential Reaction
Since the prime reason for Kane’s lecture was to build a political backfire to prevent Buchanan from removing Cumming from office, it is appropriate to ask whether this gambit worked and what the president thought of this turn of events. In brief, Kane’s strategy succeeded; with his options constrained by Kane’s national publicity campaign, Buchanan permitted Cumming to retain his gubernatorial appointment. Cannon reported to Young that Buchanan wondered with anxiety what Kane said and how it accorded with his own statements regarding the roles played by Cumming and his peace commissioners “in the settlement of the difficulties.” The “Chief Magistrate” tended to overemphasize the role of his commissioners, Cannon wrote, but was relieved nonetheless at the outcome of Kane’s talk. 66 Buchanan must have been pleased that Kane did not publicly discuss the volatile issues he encountered in Utah during 1858 but only hinted at in his correspondence with Pat Kane and Eli Price.
From the vantage point of 1886, Tullidge’s assessment was blunter than Cannon’s in 1859: “Governor Cumming was complimented by the gallant Colonel as a clear-headed, resolute, but prudent executive, and the very man for the trying position. Before such an endorsement, sent broadcast over the Republic, coming from the lips of the gentleman who had warded off the effusion of blood, and saved the nation from the expense and horror of a domestic war, the Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan silently bowed, but they were terribly chagrined.” 67 It is not known whether the president was comforted or annoyed when his US superintendent of Indian Affairs for Utah wrote him on May 12, 1859, “the Administration of His Excellency Gov. Cumming has been productive of much good; it has restored peace, quiet and confidence throughout the Territory, which will be more and more confirmed if his policy be not too much interfered with by some other Civil Officers.” 68
Notwithstanding these sensitivities, Kane had been skillful enough in the phrasing of his lecture and his subsequent conduct, that, while staying Buchanan’s hand vis-à-vis Cumming, he had also prompted the president to reconsider positively the value of consulting him again on Utah affairs. In June 1859, Buchanan invited Kane to return to the Executive Mansion for what Kane described as “a long interview which I enjoyed.” The two men spoke of General Johnston’s performance and that of several federal appointees, including Forney and Cumming, who the president said “aimed to put on an appearance of impartiality, and show he was no Mormon—but it is easy to see which way his sympathies were leaning.” In reporting this conversation to Young on Pioneer Day, Kane commented, “I wish poor Cumming’s habits were better. The President, as on previous occasions, put [to] me many questions about them whose direction I had difficulty in baffling—the more perhaps as I had just received from C. a foolish composition—very drunken indeed. Governor!—‘How long’?” 69
Elsewhere in the Executive Branch—in the army’s bivouacs across Utah Territory—critical reactions to Kane’s lecture and praise for Cumming were less restrained. When press coverage reached Camp Floyd, the response was outrage over what different reporters for the New York Times had at the time dubbed “a panegyric on that officer” and “an eulogium of Gov. Cumming.” 70
Epilogue
With the plethora of biographies available about Brigham Young, James Buchanan, Thomas L. Kane, and George Q. Cannon there is no need to dwell on the details of the rest of their lives. In the case of Cannon, though, it is worth noting that a year after Kane’s lecture, Young secretly called him to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and that he soon rose to the First Presidency, serving there as first counselor to Young in the 1870s and to each of his three successors. Cannon’s biographer, Davis Bitton, commented, “One can scarcely expect to understand the history of Mormonism without knowing George Q. Cannon. He was never president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but aside from the founding prophet, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young, no one surpassed Cannon as a leader, shaper, and defender of nineteenth-century Mormonism.” 71
Cumming lacks a full-blown biography, although there have been articles and at least one unpublished thesis written about him. 72 With the advent of the Civil War and the near-completion of his gubernatorial term, Cumming and his wife Elizabeth left Utah with Young’s good wishes and headed for Georgia. Prevented from passing through the Union Army’s lines by Abraham Lincoln, the Cummings spent the early years of the war uncomfortably in the Boston area near Elizabeth’s original home and family, with the governor occasionally sighted visiting prominent Confederate prisoners or internees confined to Fort Warren. The Lincoln administration finally permitted the Cummings to cross into the Confederacy on May 8, 1864. There is no evidence that Alfred ever communicated with Kane after the 1859 speech, or, for that matter, that he and Young corresponded after he left Utah. However, in 1866, Young noted to Utah’s delegate in Congress, “I am gratified to hear that Governor Cumming is still living, and feels so well towards his old friends in Utah. We do not forget him, and are pleased to hear from him at any time. Should he have access to President [Andrew] Johnson, and have an opportunity of speaking in relation to our citizens, his testimony, I should think, would be likely to outweigh all the lying slanders that any number of such men as our absent Chief Justice might propagate.” 73
Whether in the end Cumming realized any more than did Buchanan how much he owed Kane is unknown but, in my view, doubtful. It may all have blurred with the trauma of what the Cumming family experienced during the Civil War. After that upheaval, Cumming’s focus was probably on Reconstruction in Georgia rather than on distant Utah Territory, yet there was indeed a debt owed to Kane. During the Utah War and immediately after its military phase had morphed into a conflict of words, Kane had acted to protect the Latter-day Saints, sweeping under his aegis for several years the non-Mormon figure of Cumming. He did so when Cumming needed something approaching a guardian angel to retain his position as Utah’s governor, if not leader.
Kane loved this role, perhaps at times more so than tending to his own biological family. Biographer Alfred L. Zobell, Jr. aptly captured this need to be a protector when using Sentinel in the East to title his study of Kane in 1968. Nearly a century before Zobell wrote, Augusta Joyce Cocheron, a resident of St. George, Utah, had also caught a glimpse of this behavior one evening as an aging, ailing Kane dramatically exited her parents’ home. “Dr. Osborne” had first met Augusta as a thirteen-year-old when passing through San Bernardino in February 1858 on his way to mediate the Utah War. In 1873, while visiting St. George with his wife and two boys, Kane paid a courtesy call to Cocheron and her parents in their new home. By the visit’s end, “it had grown very dark, and it was raining. . . . Looking from the doorway on the light within and the stormy night without, he said: ‘This looks like our political horizon. Stay you in camp, eat roast beef and rest. I will go out in the storm and stand on picket guard for you.’ He extended his hand, repeated thrice, ‘goodnight,’ and was gone.” 74
If James Buchanan and Alfred Cumming had forgotten Kane at the time of their deaths in 1868 and 1873, the leaders of the Latter-day Saints did not. By early 1883 Kane had become seriously ill and virtually immobile from his multiple Civil War wounds. And so on March 4, the twenty-sixth anniversary of Buchanan’s inauguration, Cannon, the second most powerful man in the Mormon hierarchy, went out of his way en route to New York to visit Kane in Philadelphia. Although neither man knew it, this was to be their last meeting. Cannon recorded in his diary: “Called upon General Kane who had retired, but who came down upon learning it was I. Was cordially received by Mrs. Kane and children and by the General. Had a very interesting visit of two and a half hours with him.” 75 With the continual tightening of the federal antipolygamy laws and Cannon himself liable for criminal prosecution, there was plenty for the two old friends to discuss, although Cannon’s diary provides no reason to believe they touched on the bad behavior of which Kane became aware in Utah and disclosed only to his brother in 1858. One would like to think they reminisced about Kane’s cameo appearance a quarter-century earlier at the New-York Historical Society and Cannon’s role as a facilitator in moving the highlights of Kane’s lecture across the wires of the Associated Press to save Alfred Cumming’s governorship.
Notes
1. It is unknown who first used the term reconstruction to describe the turbulent period of federal occupation and oversight between the end of the Utah War and the achievement of statehood. Among historians, early use of the label appeared more than a half-century ago. See Richard D. Poll, “The Political Reconstruction of Utah Territory, 1866–1890,” Pacific Historical Review 27 (May 1958): 111–26; Everett L. Cooley, “Carpetbag Rule: Territorial Government in Utah, “Utah Historical Quarterly 26 (April 1968): 106–29. The most recent such uses are Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, eds., Reconstruction and Mormon America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019); W. Paul Reeve, “Reconstruction, Religion, and the West: The Great Impeacher Meets the Mormons,” Journal of Mormon History 46 (April 2020): 5–45.
2. Matthew J. Grow, “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Albert L. Zobell, Jr., Sentinel in the East: A Biography of Thomas L. Kane (Salt Lake City: Nicholas G. Morgan, Sr., 1968); David J. Whittaker, ed., Colonel Thomas L. Kane and the Mormons, 1846–1883 (Provo and Salt Lake City: BYU Studies and University of Utah Press, 2010).
3. Brigham Young, comments, minutes of meetings in Salt Lake City, June 11–12, 1858, general church minutes, box 1, fd. 21 and 22, Church History Library, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (CHL); and William P. MacKinnon, ed., At Sword’s Point, Part 2: A Documentary History of the Utah War, 1858–1859 (Norman, OK: Arthur H. Clark, 2016), 534.
4. Memorandum accompanying Kane to Young, July 18, 1858, Thomas L. Kane, 1857–1859, Letters from Church Leaders and Others, General Correspondence, Incoming, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234/1, CHL.
5. For more discussion of Kane’s motives and his depression, see MacKinnon, “Thomas L. Kane’s 1858 Utah War Mission: Presidential Ingratitude and Manipulation,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86 (Fall 2018): 302– 303, 312n25.
6. William Wood to Kane, September 22, 1858. Three years later, with Thomas in the Union Army as a lieutenant colonel, Elizabeth Kane bolstered her husband’s morale by reminding him that Wood had also said, “I can’t help thinking that he is destined to make his mark on these times, that [his] Utah journey . . . may all have been the Maker’s preparation for a work He had on hand for him to do.” Elizabeth Kane to Thomas Kane, August 22, 1861. Both letters in Thomas L. and Elizabeth W. Kane Family Papers, Vault MSS 792, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (HBLL).
7. Kane to Young, July 18, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files.
8. Kenneth L. Alford and William P. MacKinnon, “Communicating in Code: Brigham Young, Thomas L. Kane, and the ‘Lost’ Utah War Message of July 1858,” Utah Historical Quarterly 89 (Fall 2021).
9. For example, Young made the decision to announce the Move South to the Latter-day Saints on March 21, 1858, without consulting Kane. Earlier, on September 15, 1857, Young had proclaimed martial law in Utah without hinting at this decision in a letter he wrote Kane only three days before. During the 1860s–1870s there would be other incidents of nonconsultation as discussed in MacKinnon, review of Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker, eds., The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane in Journal of Mormon History 41 (October 2015): 238–47. Perhaps the most serious such lapse was Young’s surprise announcement in August 1852 of the practice of plural marriage. For Kane’s part, at the end of 1857 he gave Young no warning that he planned to visit Utah, and it is apparent that he was similarly uncommunicative about his intent to speak publicly in defense of Cumming and about Utah affairs in New York during March 1859.
10. Each of these components to Brigham Young’s strategy is discussed in Alford and MacKinnon, “Communicating in Code,” and MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 2: divide-and-conquer (455–58, 571, 610, 619, 638–39); influencing editors (384, 387–88, 458–60, 579, 581–82, 596–97, 636–37); and petitioning for recall of federal appointees (572, 575, 577–78, 583–84, 598, 637–38).
11. Young to Eldredge, October 20, 1858, General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876, Brigham Young Office Files.
12. Kane’s continuing efforts to influence the media’s view of Utah are described in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 2, 635–37, while in the same source, Kane’s creation and marketing of a war-peace myth atop the Mormon hierarchy are discussed in 449–55, 496–97, 610–11, 648; Editorial, Baltimore (MD) Daily Exchange, July 26, 1858, 1/1–2.
13. MacKinnon, “Thomas L. Kane’s 1858 Utah War Mission,” 304–305, and “‘Buck All Over’: James Buchanan and a Trail of Broken Relationships,” in Michael J. Birkner, Randall M. Miller, and John W. Quist, eds., The Worlds of James Buchanan and Thaddeus Stevens: Place, Personality, and Politics in the Civil War Era (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019), 125–27; Kane to Young, ca. March 1857, Thomas L. Kane Papers, Stanford University Libraries; Kane to Young, May 21, 1857, Thomas Leiper Kane Papers, WA MSS 279, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
14. Elizabeth W. Kane, “The Story of the Mother of the Regiment,” vol. 2, ch. 3, fd. 1, box 31, reel 22, Kane Papers, HBLL.
15. Kane to Buchanan, July 20, 1858, box 14, fd. 18, reel 10, Kane Papers, HBLL.
16. Elizabeth Cumming to Thomas Kane, June 25, 1858, box 14, fd. 18, Kane Papers, HBLL.
17. In writing of his “success in Washington,” Kane was projecting optimism for Cumming’s benefit that he did not feel.
18. Howell Cobb, secretary of the treasury. Cobb might have felt a special kinship with Cumming as a fellow Georgian.
19. Kane to Cumming, July 1858, fd. 17, Research Files on Thomas L. Kane, MS 1251, CHL.
20. Dispatch, Western Weekly Platte Argus, May 14, 1858, reprinted in Baltimore Sun, May 24, 1858, 1.
21. Thomas L. Kane to Judge John K. Kane, Fort Bridger, April 4, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
22. Fitz John Porter diary, April 6, 1858, box 53, Fitz-John Porter Papers, MSS 36590, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
23. Elizabeth Cumming to Alfred Cumming, April 21, 1858, Alfred Cumming Papers, RL.00273, Duke University Libraries, Durham, North Carolina; and Elizabeth Cumming, and Ray C. Canning and Beverly Beeton, eds., The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857–1858 (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund and University of Utah Library, 1977), 43–45.
24. Associated Press, “From Washington. Arrival of Colonel Kane,” Washington, June 20, 1858, New York Times, June 21, 1858; “Gov. Cumming and His Movements in Utah,” June 24, 1858, Washington Union, reprinted in New York Times, June 25, 1858, 1/1–2. Notwithstanding the favorable tone of the Union’s editorial, Kane felt that, to obtain justice for Cumming, he “had great difficulty in compelling the dishonest company owning that paper to publish in his favor.” Kane to Elizabeth Cumming, August 25, 1858, Thomas Leiper Kane Papers. If Kane felt that his interview with the Union and its editorial clarified Cumming’s role in ending the war, the anti-Buchanan National Era professed confusion over just where the credit truly belonged: Cumming, Kane himself, or the president’s peace commissioners? This was a case of Kane’s excessive rhetoric becoming counterproductive. “The Utah Question,” National Era (Washington, DC), July 1, 1858, 102.
25. John Van Deusen Du Bois to mother, June 26, 1858, Du Bois, Campaigns in the West, 1856–1861: The Journal and Letters of Colonel John Van Deusen Du Bois with Pencil Sketches by Joseph Heger, George P. Hammond, ed. (Tucson: Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, 1949; repr., Arizona Historical Society, 2003), 116–17; “S” [Simonton], “View of Mormon Affairs,” June 26, 1858, New York Times, August 3, 1858, 1/4–6, 2/1–3; William Duncan Smith to N. Wallace Smith, July 22, 1858, cube 5, box 16, Simon Gratz Papers, Collection 1571, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; George Dashiell Bayard to mother, August 1, 1858, Samuel J. Bayard, Life of George Dashiell Bayard, Late captain, U. S. A., and Brigadier-General of Volunteers, Killed in the Battle of Fredericksburg, Dec. 1862 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1874), 135–37.
26. George A. Smith, Church Historian’s Office Journal, April 13, 1858, vol. 20, and January 1, 1859, vol. 22, CR 100 1, CHL.
27. Hannah Keziah Clapp to unidentified friend, July 17, 1859, Lansing (MI) Republican, in Kenneth L. Holmes, ed. and comp., Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trails, 1840–1890, 11 vols. (Glendale, CA, and Spokane, WA: Arthur H. Clark, 1983–1993), 7:249; “A Citizen of Utah,” Salt Lake City, July 9, 1858, “The Mormons. Interesting Letter from Utah. Interior View of Mormons,” New York Times, August 10, 1858, 1/3–4; Letter, June 23, 1858, “Strange Conduct of Governor Cumming,” New York Times, August 4, 1858, 3/3.
28. Lafayette McLaws, Diary, ca. September 17 and 21, 1858, fd. 1, Lafayette McLaws Papers, Coll. 00472, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
29. Young to Horace S. Eldredge, December 30, 1858, General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876, Brigham Young Office Files.
30. Captain Alfred Cumming to Emily Cumming, November 23, 1858, Papers of the Hammond, Bryan, and Cumming Families, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
31. Millennial Star 20 (August 28, 1858), 554–56. For the earlier Kane talk, see note 44 below.
32. Kane to Price, July 16, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
33. Eli K. Price to Thomas L. Kane, July 8, 26, 1858, and Kane to Price, July 16, 30, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
34. “How Gov. Cumming Got to Salt Lake City,” St. Louis Republican, repr. in Buffalo (NY) Courier, August 5, 1858, 2/4.
35. William C. Cumming to Thomas L. Kane, September 8, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
36. Parmenas Taylor Turnley to Samuel Cooper, September 27, 1858, Letters Received, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, RG 94, National Archives, Washington, DC (NARA); Eckels to Cass, with attachments, January 15, 1859, State Department Territorial Papers, Utah Series, vol. 1, 30 April 1853–24 December 1859, microfilm 491567, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
37. Young to Kane, September 10, 1858, General Correspondence, Outgoing, 1843–1876, Brigham Young Office Files.
38. Elizabeth W. Kane, Journal, vol. 3, 41–43, November 1, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
39. Kane to Buchanan, ca. late November 1858, box 41, fds. 2, 3, Kane Papers, HBLL.
40. Elizabeth W. Kane, Journal, November 21, 1858; Thomas L. Kane to Buchanan, ca. late November 1858, both in Kane Papers, HBLL.
41. Price to Buchanan, November 17, 1858, Lot #1139, Nate D. Sanders Auctions, accessed June 15, 2021, natedsanders.com/Eli-K-Price-Autograph-Letter -Signed-to-President-lot13885.aspx, copy in author’s possession.
42. James Buchanan, “Second Annual Message of the President,” December 6, 1858, John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1910), 10:245. When Buchanan published his memoirs in 1866, he confined his discussion of Kane’s Utah War role to a repetition of the same sentence, not even bothering to update Kane’s military title from colonel to that of major general. Buchanan, Mr. Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York: D. Appleton, 1866), 238. Judge John Cadwalader to Thomas L. Kane, April 19, 1869; Elizabeth W. Kane, Journal, December 5, 1858, both in Kane Papers, HBLL.
43. Elizabeth W. Kane, Journal, December 5, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
44. Thomas L. Kane, The Mormons: A Discourse Delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March 26, 1850 (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1850).
45. Kane to H. H. Cumming, December 18, 1858, Thomas L. Kane Correspondence, American Historical Manuscripts Collection, New-York Historical Society, New York, New York (hereafter NYHS). William Cumming informed Kane in his earlier letter that he had conferred with his brother Henry and “his opinions coincide substantially with my own.” William Cumming to Kane, September 8, 1858, Kane Papers, HBLL.
46. Laurence A. Williams to Martha Williams, March 9, 1859, Martha Custis Williams Carter Papers, MS 6, Tudor Place Foundation, Washington, DC.
47. Robert Patterson Kane to Thomas L. Kane, March 12, 1859, Kane Papers, HBLL.
48. Elizabeth W. Kane, Journal, March 13, 1859, Kane Papers, HBLL. For additional insight into the lecture’s origins and development, see also the entries for February 27 and March 4, 5, 21, and 24, 1859.
49. George Q. Cannon to Young, March 18, 1859, George Q. Cannon, 1858–1859, Letters from Church Leaders and Others, General Correspondence, Incoming, Brigham Young Office Files.
50. “The Utah Expedition: Its Causes and Consequences,” Atlantic Monthly: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics 3 (March–May 1859): 361–75, 474–91, and 570–84.
51. New York Times, March 22, 1859, 4.
52. The most insightful and recent discussion of Kane’s lecture is in Grow and Walker, The Prophet and the Reformer, 331–32. I have searched the files of the NYHS and all of the known collections of Kane’s personal papers for this text without finding it. In 1971, descendant E. Kent Kane tried mightily to find a copy of the lecture without success, despite persistent inquiries among his contacts at the NYHS, LDS church, and Deseret News. My own first awareness of the lecture came in May 1999, and, upon querying the NYHS archivist, she responded “there is no manuscript copy in our collections.” Melissa Haley to MacKinnon, June 7, 1999.
53. Not recorded by the Tribune’s reporter was Kane’s account of the financial difficulties with which Cumming became entangled during the 1830s. New York Journal of Commerce, repr. in “Governor Alfred Cumming,” Daily Constitutionalist (Augusta, GA), March 27, 1859, 3/2.
54. Probably “Hurlothrumbo”: terror-inspiring supernatural apparitions, from a play by Samuel Johnson.
55. During the American Revolution, “cowboys” and “skinners” were Caucasian guerrillas in the South who were pro-British and pro-Independence, respectively. Kane loved to use these terms in a variety of western contexts, as in his April 4, 1858, letter to Buchanan.
56. Apparently a muddled reference to the February 25, 1858, raid by Bannock and northern Shoshone warriors on Fort Limhi, the Mormon mission and Nauvoo Legion outpost on Oregon Territory’s Salmon River.
57. The quote is from Alfred Cumming to Albert Sidney Johnston, April 15, 1858, John B. Floyd, “Report of the Secretary of War, December 6, 1858,” Message from the President of the United States, House Exec. Doc. 2 (35–2), Serial 942, 72–73. Apparently at the lecture Kane gave the Tribune reporter his retained copy of the letter, which he had drafted in Salt Lake City for Cumming’s signature a year earlier, or he provided him with the published text which the war department released under date of December 6, 1858, as part of the secretary of war’s annual report for 1858. Quaking Aspen Hill and the spring near its summit were prominent landmarks on the Mormon Trail between Fort Bridger and Salt Lake City. Here, the Nauvoo Legion rendezvoused in secret with Kane during March 1858 while he worked at Fort Bridger to gain Alfred Cumming’s trust.
58. To the contrary, during this period and for several years thereafter, Thomas and Elizabeth Kane drafted extensive accounts of his Utah experiences, among other subjects. During the summer of 1858, Thomas had provided materials about his Mormon mission to his brother Pat in hopes that he would produce a publishable manuscript about the war in the event that Thomas became too ill to do so. None of these drafts were published by the Kanes. The holograph manuscripts are now in the collections of the American Philosophical Society and Brigham Young University.
59. “Mr. Kane on the Executive of Utah,” New-York Daily Tribune, March 22, 1859, 7/2. It is not clear what Kane was trying to say with this indirect phrasing. It is akin to the murky allusions to unspecified wrongdoing by unnamed people in high places that he earlier used with Eli Price and Pat Kane.
60. Young to Kane, September 10, 1858; the letter of introduction is Young to Kane, September 1, 1858, both Brigham Young Office Files. In introducing Cannon, Young informed Kane that “he will act entirely under your direction,” and expressed the hope that their collaboration would develop into “a mutual friendship” with the result being statehood for Utah and “ridding our fair Territory of her foreign dictators and oppressors.”
61. Millennial Star 20 (August 28, 1858), 554–56; see also Ronald W. Walker, “The Stenhouses and the Making of a Mormon Image,” Journal of Mormon History 1 (1974): 51–72.
62. George Q. Cannon, Journal, March 20–21, 1859, The Journal of George Q. Cannon, accessed April 19, 2021, churchhistorianspress.org/george-q-cannon.
63. Cannon to Young, April 6, 14, 1859, Brigham Young Office Files.
64. George Q. Cannon, “General Thomas L. Kane,” Contributor 5 (March 1884): 234–39.
65. Edward W. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Star Printing, 1886), 232–33.
66. Cannon to Young, April 6, 1858, Brigham Young Office Files; see also MacKinnon, “Thomas L. Kane’s 1858 Utah War Mission,” 308.
67. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City, 232–33.
68. Jacob Forney to Buchanan, May 12, 1859, Letters Received from the President (1858–59), box 2, fd. 6, stack 230, row 1, compartment 30, shelf 2, Attorney General’s Papers, RG 60, NARA.
69. Kane to Young, July 24, 1859, Thomas L. Kane, 1857– 1859, Letters from Church Leaders and Others, General Correspondence, Incoming, Brigham Young Office Files.
70. See John Moore to Mary Moore Kelly, May 10, 1859, GLC04194.16, John Moore Collection, Gilder Lehrman Collection, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York.
71. Davis Bitton, George Q. Cannon: A Biography (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999), ix.
72. Benjamin Franklin Perry, “Alfred Cumming,” Reminiscences of Public Men, by Ex-Gov. B. F. Perry (Philadelphia: John D. Avil, 1883), 290–96; Charles S. Peterson, “A Historical Analysis of Territorial Government in Utah under Alfred Cumming, 1857–1861” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1958).
73. Young to William H. Hooper, February 8, 1866, Letterpress copybook, vol. 8, 85–88, Brigham Young Office Files.
74. Augusta Joyce Cocheron, “Reminiscences of General Kane,” Contributor 6 (1884–1885): 475–77.
75. Cannon, Journal, March 4, 1883, Journal of George Q. Cannon.
