his relationship with Young.
Kane and Young were in many ways an odd pair: the pragmatic prophet
and the quixotic reformer, the millenarian who spoke in tongues with the
skeptic of organized religion, the Yankee from humble origins and the aris-
tocratic Pennsylvanian. The correspondence between Kane and Young shows
these differences in their writing styles. Kane’s sentences can be learned, pol-
ished, and sometimes written in a complex manner. In contrast, Young’s style
is more direct and pulsates with energy.
For all of their differences, several factors united Kane and Young. Both
dreamed expansively, devoted much of their energies to colonizing efforts, and
saw their own roles as historic. Both blamed the Mormons’ woes on Protestant
evangelicals and joined forces to battle what they saw as religious persecution.
Both felt they had a stubborn independence from society’s traditions and cor-
ruptions. Both were visionaries who saw themselves as workers on behalf of
the downtrodden. In 1846, when Kane began his friendship with Young, he
saw himself as a disinterested humanitarian taking on the cause of the Saints.
His relationship with the Mormons became much more than this; unlike the
objects of his other reforms (which included slaves, prisoners, and the poor),
Kane could not keep an emotional distance from the Mormons.
Young needed Kane as well, valuing his political advice, connections, and
image-making talents. As a result, he continually tried to pull Kane closer
to the Saints, offering him political offices and money, encouraging his con-
version, and cultivating relationships between Kane and his own sons. Kane
repeatedly refused the economic and political enticements, arguing that they
would tarnish his reputation as an independent reformer and weaken his
ability to assist the Saints. Their friendship proved emotionally satisfying and
29. Elizabeth
W. Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey through Utah
to Arizona (Philadelphia: 1874), 5, 101.
30. Elizabeth W. Kane to Francis Fisher Kane, February 15, 1904, Francis Fisher Kane Papers, APS.
Introduction
9
mutually advantageous. Kane’s wife Elizabeth perceptively wrote that both
Kane and Young “had great magnetic power” and “each influenced the other
strongly.”31 Kane called Young “an eccentric great man” and Young praised
Kane as a heroic iconoclast who waged “the battle of life, for the right, against
all opposing powers, rising above the afflictions and reverses which beset your
pathway, and stand[ing] forth to the world, the champion of truth, liberty and
honour.”32
Besides Kane’s visit to the Mormon camps in 1846, he and Young met
personally only during two other periods of time: during the spring of 1858, as
Kane negotiated an end to the Utah War, and during the winter of 1872–1873,
when he traveled to Utah to meet with Young and recover his health. Their
lack of personal contact is a boon for historians. During their relationship,
Kane and Young exchanged a remarkable set of detailed and candid letters,
99 of which are reproduced in this volume. “I have also to thank you for your
kind hearted letters,” Kane once wrote, “always so fresh and racy and spirited
in composition.”33 The correspondence between Kane and Young waxed and
waned with events and personal circumstances.
Young very rarely wrote letters in his own hand, though he routinely dic-
tated letters to various scribes.34 Some of Young’s first letters to Kane were written or shaped by Willard Richards, Young’s second counselor in the church’s
First Presidency who sometimes served as Young’s scribe. By contrast, Kane
generally wrote his own letters, though his wife Elizabeth sometimes served
as his scribe. Kane and Young often sent their letters by trusted couriers, often
Young’s sons or other Mormon missionaries and leaders, to ensure that their
contents remained confidential. Kane and Young carefully preserved the vast
bulk of their correspondence, which is now primarily at the Church History
Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the L. Tom Perry
Special Collections at Brigham Young University, but is also found at Yale
Their correspondence gives tremendous insight into Mormon history and
the development of the American west. Few figures exerted as profound an
31. Elizabeth W
. Kane to Francis Fisher Kane, February 15, 1904.
32. Kane to James Buchanan, [ca. March 15, 1858], Kane Collection, BYU; Young to Kane, 22
November 1858.
33. Kane to Young, September 24, 1850.
34. The Brigham Young collections at the Church History Library contain well over 15,000
incoming and outgoing letters from Young. There has only been one prior book of Young’s letters, Dean Jessee, Letters of Brigham Young to his Sons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1974).
10 intrOductiOn
influence on nineteenth-century American history, particularly in the west, as
Brigham Young. Extremely controversial in his own day, he remains a com-
pelling historical actor of perennial interest. For many, both in his day and
in ours, Young is a symbol of polygamy, religious fanaticism, and misguided
theocratic ambitions. Others see him as an American genius who success-
fully led the Saints’ exodus to Utah and established the Mormon West. Yet
others view Young as an inspired prophet. Indeed, Young remains an enig-
matic figure, with his personal character and political and religious ambitions
shrouded by both the vagaries of time and the controversies surrounding his
life. His correspondence with Kane—plotting strategy, commenting on the
major issues of the day, revealing his personal judgments—offers crucial
insights into Young’s personal life and views as well as his actions as a political and religious leader. Understanding his relationship with Kane and their rich
correspondence is indispensable to a correct assessment of Young’s character
and actions.
Moreover, the correspondence between Kane and Young reveals the strate-
gies of the Latter-day Saints in relating to American culture and government
during these crucial decades when controversy over the “Mormon Question”
was a major political, cultural, and legal issue. The Kane–Young letters dem-
onstrate both the campaigns against the Mormons as well as the shifting tac-
tics taken by the Saints in response. Kane’s position as the Saints’ unofficial
lobbyist and image-maker on the East Coast additionally demonstrates how
debates over Mormonism intersected with other national controversies over
the development of the west, popular sovereignty, American Indians, gov-
ernment of the territories, and the sectional crisis. Indeed, with its focus on
national concerns and the Saints’ relationship with the federal government,
the Kane–Young correspondence illustrates that the “Mormon Question” was
a major national issue which can be fully understood only within the context
of these other national political debates of the mid- nineteenth century.
The correspondence b
etween Kane and Young gives insight into most of
the major controversies surrounding the Latter-day Saints between the late
1840s and the late 1870s. Following the return of Kane from the Mormon
camps and the beginning of the Latter-day Saint exodus to Utah in 1847,
Kane and Young initially collaborated to alter the nation’s perceptions of the
Mormons and to obtain political autonomy within the American system.
Kane hoped to transform the national image of the Latter-day Saints, with
Young’s support and advice, by embarking upon a multi-year campaign which
appealed to culturally powerful narratives of religious liberty, persecution, and
suffering. Most Americans saw Mormons as fraudulent fanatics who posed
a grave danger to mainstream religion and American republicanism. Kane,
Introduction
11
however, depicted Mormons as a persecuted religious minority forced from
their homes, a narrative that resonated with the cherished American story of
persecuted Pilgrims coming to the New World. In his public relations cam-
paign, Kane placed anonymous articles in major newspapers and wrote two
influential pamphlets which used the symbol of suffering Saints, of Mormons
dying on the American plains from hunger and sickness, to argue that they
could peacefully coexist with other Americans.
For a time, Kane’s narrative succeeded in capturing the attention of
America’s opinion-makers and rousing substantial sympathy for the Saints.
Both Young and Kane believed that Mormon security required self-government
and they seized this moment to attempt to secure political autonomy through
the political doctrine of local decision-making as a U.S. territory (“popular
sovereignty”) or the ultimate goal of statehood. Mormon leaders did not seem
anxious to set up an independent religious kingdom in the Great Basin as
some historians have suggested. In fact, their political experience was in many
ways like that of other western territories: westerners wanted to make their
own decisions about their respective settlements.
When Washington, D.C., took no action on giving Utah territorial status,
Young and Kane pushed for a Mormon state of Deseret, which stretched across
much of the west. Despite Young’s efforts and Kane’s lobbying, their attempt
fell victim to the Compromise of 1850. Nevertheless, aided by Kane’s public
relations forays, they secured a partial victory when Young was appointed as
governor of the new Utah Territory. At the same time, several outsiders were
appointed to Utah territorial posts; following a short stay in Utah, this first
group of non-Mormon territorial officials fled the state in 1851, carrying east
tales of Mormon polygamy and disloyalty.35
Kane’s attempts to quash these charges led Mormon leaders to finally
reveal to him the existence of polygamy. Wounded that he had been involved
in the Saints’ deception, Kane compared the revelation in his diary to the dis-
covery of a “wife’s infidelity.”36 Though he and Young privately debated the
merits of polygamy, Kane quickly returned to defending the Mormons and
advised the Mormons to publicly acknowledge plural marriage. When they
did so in August 1852, public sympathy for the Saints, the possibility of Utah
35. R
onald W. Walker, “The Affair of the ‘Runaways’: Utah’s First Encounter with the Federal Officers,” Journal of Mormon History 39.4 (Fall 2013): 1–43; Walker and Matthew J. Grow, “The People Are ‘Hogaffed or Humbugged’: The 1851–52 National Reaction to Utah’s ‘Runaway’
Officers,” Journal of Mormon History 40.1 (Winter 2014): 1–52.
36. Kane, journal, December 27–28, 1851, BYU.
12 intrOductiOn
statehood, and the credibility of Kane’s narrative of the suffering Saints for
most Americans evaporated. Though Young continued as governor, most
other territorial positions were filled by outsiders, virtually guaranteeing con-
tinued disputes.
The Kane–Young relationship also provides a key for interpreting one of
the most important events of the 1850s. In his first month in office in 1857,
President James Buchanan faced reports of a Mormon rebellion against fed-
eral authority in Utah. In response, Buchanan decided to remove Young as
governor and send his replacement, Alfred Cumming of Georgia, with a
military escort, which became the largest military expedition between the
Mexican–American War and the Civil War. The possibility of armed conflict
between the Mormons and the nation increased as the Saints vowed to resist
what they viewed as an unconstitutional attempt to trample their rights, impose
outside officials, and potentially destroy their community. The episode, which
has largely been overshadowed in historical accounts by the sectional conflict
and the Civil War, was a major military, political, legal, and cultural confronta-
tion which threatened to turn the debate over the “Mormon Question” into
a shooting war. The timely intervention of Kane and his collaboration with
Young proved crucial in working out a compromise between the government
and the Mormons.
Kane persuaded Buchanan to allow him to travel to Utah in a semi-official
capacity to mediate the conflict. Kane sailed from New York City through
Panama and on to California, before traveling overland to Utah. Meeting
with Young and other Mormon leaders in Salt Lake City, Kane urged the
Saints to conciliate the army. He then traveled through deep snows to the
army’s winter camp, at Camp Scott in present-day Wyoming. Once there,
Kane sent letters via Mormon couriers to Young, recounting the opposition
to his plan of conciliation by military leaders and his success in convincing
a willing Cumming to travel without the army to Salt Lake City. After Kane
and Cumming arrived in Salt Lake City, Young and Kane brokered a peace
with Cumming, and, by extension, between the Mormons and the nation.
During the next two years, Kane worked behind-the-scenes with Young’s
encouragement to influence the press and federal officials to preserve his
view of the proper resolution to the conflict, which rested on an alliance
between Cumming and Young. Although fiercely opposed by many federal
officials and army officers in Utah, the efforts of Kane and Young kept the
Utah War peace in place until the Civil War, ensuring that the resolution
of the “Mormon Question” would be transferred from the battlefield to the
realm of politics and law.
Introduction
13
During the 1860s, both the nation and Kane turned their attention away
from Mormonism and toward the sectional conflict. As the nation remounted
its crusade against Mormonism in the 1870s and 1880s, Kane and Young again
plotted strategy to thwart the nation’s legal and political campaign against the
Saints. As the national campaign against Mormonism accelerated, Young and
Kane worked to obtain Utah statehood and to block anti-polygamy legislation
in Congress. In 1871, Young and Kane exchanged a flurry of letters discussing
legal and political strategy when Young was placed under house arrest for
“lascivious cohabitation”—Young’s celebrated plural ma
rriage. Along with his
wife, Kane traveled to Utah during the winter of 1872–1873, a visit that led his
wife Elizabeth, long suspicious of the Saints, to defend Mormon women in
one of the best travel accounts of early Utah history, Twelve Mormon Homes.
The final years before Young’s death in 1877 were an unwinding. After Kane
encouraged Young to disentangle himself economically from the church
(with Kane as his lawyer in writing his will), the two men discussed plans for
Mormon colonization of Mexico, Mormon education, Indian rights and policy,
and communitarian practices.
By the late 1870s, the status of the Latter-day Saints had been transformed
in significant ways from the refugee camps of 1846. Most obviously, under
Young’s leadership, Mormon settlements had spread over much of the west.
Mormonism, which many observers had predicted to be on the brink of extinc-
tion in 1846, had continued to expand. Thousands of Mormon converts, both
from the United States and Europe, migrated annually to Utah and the sur-
rounding regions.
The question of the relationship between the Latter-day Saints and the
nation, however, had not been settled. From one perspective, the efforts of
Young and Kane had failed: Utah was still a territory, Mormons were still the
nation’s most reviled religious group, and controversy over Mormonism’s
polygamy and theocratic ambitions remained a leading national issue.
Nevertheless, the collaboration between Young and Kane had ensured that
the resolution to the “Mormon Question” would entail a series of politi-
cal, legal, and religious compromises, rather than a military confrontation.
Significantly, their three decades of joint effort had protected the Latter-day
Saint community, allowed the Mormons to practice their conception of
religious liberty in nineteenth-century America, and delayed the compro-
mises between the Mormons and the nation (which occurred in the 1890s
as the Saints renounced polygamy and church participation in politics)
until the Latter-day Saint community had become firmly established in
the west.
14 intrOductiOn
Acknowledgments
In the years that we have worked on this project, we have garnered many
debts. Able research assistants—Amanda Borneman, Russell Stevenson,