125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857-58

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 52, 1984, No. 3

125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857-58

BY WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

The World generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile, but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

AMERICANS, AMONG OTHER PEOPLE, LOVE CONSPIRACY THEORIES, and they have used them to explain a growing list of tragedies in U.S. history ranging from presidential assassinations to the way in which the nation goes to war. It is not surprising then that conspiracy theories have also clung to the historiography of the U.S. Army's operations in the trans-Mississippi West, including that of a campaign that without notice recently marked its 125th anniversary — the Utah Expedition of 1857-58.

Interestingly, it is a campaign about which relatively little has been written during the past twenty years, notwithstanding the fact that James Buchanan's attempt to suppress what he believed to be a Mormon rebellion with nearly one-third of the U.S. Army was the nation's most extensive and expensive military undertaking during the period between the Mexican and Civil wars. Estimates of the monetary cost to the U.S. government alone range between $14 million and $40 million, the real beginning of a large national debt.

There is no need to rehash the operational details of the Utah Expedition in view of the appearance in 1960 of the standard work on the subject, Norman F. Furniss's The Mormon Conflict, 1850- 1859. But some background in summary form may be helpful.

Irrespective of its origins, the campaign eventually pitted on the one hand Bvt. Brig. Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston's two federal brigades, a force larger than that with which Grant garrisoned a recalcitrant Mississippi ten years later; and on the other, Gov. Brigham Young's Utah Territorial Militia (Nauvoo Legion), a command perhaps larger than the entire U.S. Army. The scene was the mountain ranges and deserts of Utah — not today's familiar nearrectangular state but rather a sprawling territory the boundaries of which ranged from Kansas Territory to California while encompassing the present states of Utah and Nevada as well as parts of what are now Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho.

As Johnston's command approached Utah in the late summer of 1857, Young reacted by recalling missionaries from Europe and the eastern states, pulling in the large Mormon colonies at San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Carson Valley, and by stockpiling arms and ammunition. He also proclaimed martial law and sealed the territory's borders. Young then mobilized the Nauvoo Legion which undertook an extensive scorched earth policy and campaign of guerrilla-style harrassment along Utah's eastern frontier. As a result, Forts Supply and Bridger were burned, mountain passes were fortified and blocked, and a significant portion of the federal supply trains was attacked and burned with huge losses of rations, uniforms, tents, and ammunition. When the Nauvoo Legion also put the torch to miles of grassland needed for forage, Johnston lost thousands of cavalry mounts and draft animals, a blow that sent federal detachments in search of remounts into the British possessions to the north and New Mexico Territory to the south.

Thus weakened and harrassed, Johnston concluded with the arrival of snowfall that he could not force the passes into Salt Lake City that winter. His command settled into the charred remains of Fort Bridger and an embarrassing, frustrating, and uncomfortable winter at half-rations. While waiting for spring, remounts, and reinforcements, the troops labored as draft animals, and pickets exchanged gunfire with Mormon scouts. In the meantime, the army's general-in-chief, Winfield Scott, prepared to inject a second brigade into Utah's western flank via the Isthmus of Panama and southern California, a plan that was abandoned in January 1858 in favor of a more conventional thrust from Kansas Territory in the spring.

When President Buchanan undertook to end the campaign and his embarrassment through a negotiated settlement, Brigham Young entered into discussions with Buchanan's civilian commissioners. In the summer of 1858 an agreement was reached. Young was replaced as territorial governor, and Johnston's reinforced command marched unopposed through a Salt Lake City deserted and ready for the torch to a site thirty miles to the south. This bivouac, Camp Floyd, became the country's largest garrison until the Civil War. Buchanan, in turn, issued a blanket pardon to Utah's population.

If the troop movements are clear, the expedition's origins are not, due in part to the destruction and loss of many of President Buchanan's and Secretary of War John B. Floyd's personal papers. The absence of internal Cabinet and War Department memoranda add to the ambiguity. What is known is that in April 1857 significant troop movements were ordered, and on May 28 — less than three months after Buchanan took office and only days after General Scott himself opposed a move against Utah — Scott released a circular to the army's staff bureaus announcing the creation of a Military Department of Utah and the intent to garrison it with a multi-regiment expeditionary force of infantry, artillery, and dragoons to be marshalled at Fort Leavenworth. A few weeks later, Scott's aide-decamp informed the expedition's commander that "The community and, in part, the civil government of Utah Territory are in a state of substantial rebellion against the laws and authority of the United States." Buchanan and Floyd did not comment publicly on the subject until December 1857 in the former's year-end message to Congress, a point at which Johnston's first brigade was already bivouacked in discomfort at Fort Bridger. Buchanan argued that ". . . for several years, in order to maintain his independence . . . [Young] had been industriously employed in collecting and fabricating arms and munitions of war. . . . This is the first rebellion which has existed in our territories, and humanity itself requires that we should put it down in such a manner that it shall be the last."

From such thin documentary gruel have emerged 125 years of conspiracy theories to supplement Furniss's less sinister analysis of Mormon persecution, conflicts with federal surveyors over land claims staked under Mexican rule, Utah's violent religious reformation of 1856, and the often unacceptable behavior of federal appointees assigned to Utah Territory. Perhaps the first commentator to perceive a conspiracy behind the decision to intervene militarily in Utah was Brigham Young, then the territory's governor and superintendent of Indian Affairs, as well as commander of its militia and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Notwithstanding James Buchanan's March 4, 1857, inaugural assertion that "Next in importance to the maintenance of the Constitution and the Union is the duty of preserving the Government free from the taint or even the suspicion of corruption,"" Young argued from the beginning that the campaign was undertaken largely to enrich commercial friends of the Buchanan administration, especially the large freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell. On July 26, 1857, in his first public address after news of the Utah Expedition's approach had reached Salt Lake City, Young commented:

I am a Yankee guesser, and guess that James Buchanan has ordered this expedition to appease the wrath of the angry hounds who are howling around him. He did not design to start men on the 15th of July to cross these plains to this point on foot. Russell & Co. will probably make from eight to ten hundred thousand dollars by freighting the baggage of the expedition.

One of Young's daughters later advanced the same argument as did the Deseret News, which asked:

And what, think you, is the plan? By carefully working the wires of slander . . . they have induced President Buchanan and his Cabinet to order a body of troops to proceed at vast expense to a country and people where all is and ever has been so orderly. . . . But what care those speculators and politicians for a far worse than useless expenditure of treasure, toil, and hardship, so their pockets are well filled by the operation . . .?

Here then is an economic interpretation of the Utah Expedition, one which, in turn, generated the label the "Contractors' War."

Millions of military contracting dollars, of course, did flow into and through Russell, Majors 8c Waddell, but what did more than anything else to sustain those who scented a linkage between the firm and the Utah Expedition's origins was a miasma of corruption within the Buchanan administration generally and a spectacle of ineptness and misadministration in John B. Floyd's handling of the War Department. Congressional committee after committee investigated Buchanan's abuse of the patronage — often in connection with Kansas affairs — while still other panels probed Secretary Floyd's contracting role in the construction of the Washington aqueduct, the heating of the Capitol, the purchase of real estate for Fort Totten, the sale of Fort Snelling, and the purchase of horses, mules, cattle, flour, and transportation for the Utah Expedition. The scene was such that in 1858 a 100-page satirical poem was published anonymously in Boston to ridicule the campaign and an unpublished play was drafted for the same purpose.

As Mary and Raymond Settle have indicated in their studies of Russell, Majors & Waddell, the firm's ultimate collapse rather than its prosperity was rooted in the Utah Expedition. Nonetheless, Floyd was forced to resign in December 1860 and was indicted for malfeasance of office and conspiracy to defraud the government when it became known that a distant relative had stolen $870,000 in bonds from the Interior Department to forestall disclosure of Floyd's inappropriate financing arrangements for the expedition with William H. Russell. In 1864, with the light of hindsight, General Scott commented in his memoirs:

The 'Expedition' set on foot by Mr. Secretary Floyd, in 1857, against the Mormons and Indians about Salt Lake, was, beyond a doubt, to give occasion for large contracts and expenditures, that is to open a wide field for frauds and peculation. This purpose was not comprehended nor scarcely suspected in, perhaps, a year; but, observing the desperate characters who frequented the secretary, some of whom had desks near him, suspicion was at length excited.

More recent historians have been equally critical in their judgments. In a 1963 study of Floyd's administration, W. A. Swanberg described him as "... a man so downright disorderly and careless that it is still hard to tell where confusion ended and mischief began," 18 while ten years later Professors C. Vann Woodward and Michael F. Holt also focused on Buchanan and Floyd in their analysis of executive misconduct for the Watergate impeachment proceedings. Woodward, for example, concluded that:

Much of the improper conduct had been practiced since Jackson's time, but it culminated and flourished most luxuriantly under Buchanan. . . . His administration marked the low point before the Civil War and somewhat approached later levels of corruption.

Holt, in the same study, argued that:

The Virginian Floyd does not appear to have profited personally from the War Department contracts or to have realized always how he was exploited. He was simply a careless administrator who tried too hard to please his friends and fellow party members.

Only John M. Belohlavek, among recent historians, portrays Floyd as a reasonably competent but unlucky figure.

Although it has been established that once the Utah Expedition was underway the Buchanan administration used patronage and contracting leverage to benefit its friends, it has never been demonstrated that the concept of an expedition against the Mormons was motivated by such a factor. Nonetheless, because of the corruption surrounding both the Buchanan White House and its War Department, the conspiracy theory of a "Contractors' War" lives on. One finds it even in the most recent monograph on the campaign.

Like other forms of intellectual activity, one conspiracy theory will sometimes spawn another. Thus the combination of an existing "Contractors' War" theory, President Buchanan's subsequent ambivalence in the face of sectional conflict, the onset of the Civil War, John B. Floyd's active (although ineffective) service as a Confederate general, and Northern introspection as to how the war began gave rise to what one might call the "Great Conspiracy" perception: the belief that Southerners or Southern sympathizers in Buchanan's cabinet — Secretary of War Floyd, a Virginian; Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb, a Georgian; Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson, a Mississippian; and Secretary of the Navy Isaac Toucey of Connecticut — were actively engaged through the Utah Expedition in weakening the federal establishment for the secessionist thrust ahead. Although he did not refer specifically to Utah, John A. Logan, the Illinois politician and Union general officer, sketched the broad outline of the general theory in his 1886 book entitled The Great Conspiracy: Its Origin and History:

But before leaving the [Buchanan] Cabinet, the conspiring members of it, and their friends, had managed to ham-string the National Government, by scattering the Navy in other quarters of the World; by sending the few troops of the United States to remote points; by robbing the arsenals in the Northen States of arms and munitions of war, so as to abundantly supply the Southern States at the critical moment; by bankrupting the Treasury and shattering the public credit of the Nation.

Nearly twenty years later T. B. H. Stenhouse formulated the specific linkage between Logan's belief and the Utah Expedition:

It is difficult to resist the conclusion that the opportunity afforded by the U.S. military expedition to Utah in 1857 was not eagerly seized by Mr. Floyd as favorable to the long-cherished scheme for the rebellion of 1861. At all events . . . placing "the flower of the American army" so far away from rail and water, with such a huge mass of munitions of war — which were wholly lost to the nation — was not inharmonious with the general plan of Mr. Buchanan's Secretary of War preparatory to the declaration of secession.

Fueling the controversy was the fact that on the eve of the Civil War the army was indeed scattered, with 183 of its 198 companies assigned to isolated army posts in the West, principally in Utah. In total, only five companies garrisoned nine thinly manned forts along the Southern coast. Buchanan subsequently complained that in November 1860 he held less than 1,000 men at his immediate disposal. In his study of the War Department, A. Howard Meneely concluded that "It is inconceivable that military affairs could have been in a much more unfortunate condition than they were as 1860 drew to a close. . . ."

Perhaps more inflammatory was the assertion made as the Civil War began and subsequently that during the antebellum period Floyd had transferred disproportionate quantities of small arms from Northern to Southern arsenals where tens of thousands of them were vulnerable to capture by secessionists. Similar attention has been drawn to Floyd's premature and irregular attempt during 1860 to transfer 110 columbiad cannons and eleven 32-pounder cannons from the federal arsenal at Pittsburgh to forts at Ship Island, Mississippi, and Galveston, Texas.

Both subtheories are tantalizing and have been much studied; neither has been established as conclusive evidence of secessionist urges on Floyd's part, let alone proof that as early as 1857 the Utah Expedition was being initiated or manipulated for pro-Southern purposes. Two days before he resigned as secretary of war in December 1860, Floyd argued that "There is not one branch of the military service that is not in perfect order. ... No system of administration, no line of policy, I think, could reach better results. . . ." Yet a month later he cryptically told a Virginia audience, "I undertook so to dispose of the power in my hands, that when the terrific hour came, you and all of you, and each of you, should say, 'This man has done his duty.' " Meneely's 1928 assessment of Floyd's latter statement was that "... his blatant outburst was probably nothing more than self-glorification and an attempt to ingratiate himself and gain influence with the southern leaders, among whom he heretofore had but little standing." Thirty-five years later, in an article entitled "Was the Secretary of War a Traitor?" Swanberg concluded that "Considering Floyd's capacity for creating chaos, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that when he quit Washington the Union's gain was the South's loss."

The conspiracy theory that has been perhaps least developed over the years deals not with contractors or secessionists but rather with a linkage between political events and troop movements involving Utah and neighboring Kansas Territory. In a sense, two conflicting perceptions took shape around civil strife in Kansas. The first, frequently held by Republican critics of the Buchanan administration, argued that the Utah Expedition was devised not to suppress a Mormon rebellion but rather was intended to funnel large numbers of troops into Kansas for the purpose of opposing the abolitionist faction in that territory. Even as he marched to Utah, a pro-Fremont dragoon private in Johnston's command wrote to a Philadelphia newspaper:

For my part, I continue in the belief that the United States do not want to punish Young at all. . . . May not this concentration of forces here be for the purpose of having them near at hand in case they should be needed to crush out "abolitionism" in Kansas, without subjecting the government to the accusation of keeping a large armed force in that territory?

Conversely, the Atlantic Monthly's correspondent with the expedition and other observers argued that Buchanan's real interest was to divert public attention from Kansas affairs while minimizing clashes between civilians and troops by reassigning the latter to Utah. Within that context Furniss has noted that in April 1857 Robert Tyler of Virginia wrote to Buchanan to state:

I believe that we can supersede the Negro-Mania [over Kansas] with the almost universal excitement of an Anti-Mormon Crusade. . . . Should you, with your accustomed grip, seize this question with a strong, fearless and resolute hand, the Country I am sure will rally to you with an earnest enthusiasm and the pipings of Abolitionism will hardly be heard amidst the thunders of the storm we shall raise.

A year later, with the spectacle of two brigades drawn from ten regiments already enmeshed in Utah, Mormoniad's anonymous author addressed the subject of President Buchanan's behavior in verse form:

... "A Message from the President! An Army for the Mormon War!"

The Speaker shouted, as he rent

The seals asunder. "Hip! hurrah!" All hipped, and all hurrahed. . . . "Members of Congress," thus began The Message of the wifeless man [Buchanan],

"'Tis time to pause; too long ye play — From morn to night, from night to day; Forgetful of the Eagle's Wing — Ten thousand changes on a string Of nigger catgut — botheration! — Which stretches, like an incubus Of one eternal, endless fuss, From North to South athwart the Nation! 'Tis time to pause, and, pausing, cut Forever this disgusting gut, That groans above us, in the middle, And place another on the fiddle! Admit Lecompton, and the curse Of curses leaves us in — a hearse! Admit, I say, Lecompton; and, sirs, I'll draw my army out of Kansas, And with it — what is needed most — Make Mormon Young 'give up the ghost.'. . ."

Finally, Paul Bailey argues without supporting detail that "There were obscure political reasons for generating military hostility in the far west to forestall the divisive states' rights ferment which was gripping the nation."

In summary, then, each of the three principal conspiracy theories dealing with James Buchanan's decision to intervene with massive force in Utah Territory only months after taking office remains unproven. All offer simple and at times appealing explanations of the origins of a campaign rooted in a complex, decadeslong flow of events.

That there was, in fact, a "Contractors' War" of sorts is clear; but with respect to timing, the twin forces of patronage and greed were unattractive by-products of the Utah Expedition rather than its source. Neither the multiple congressional investigations unleashed nor an examination of the papers of Russell, Majors 8c Waddell and its partners leads to any other conclusion, although the Buchanan administration's record of laxness, insensitivity, and boldness in the patronage arena, especially during the period 1858-60, have made it inviting for some analysts to project this record onto the decisionmaking process of the administration's opening days.

Similarly, the concept of a pro-Southern cabal in Buchanan's cabinet has served to explain in some minds not only the secession movement of 1860-61 and the early reverses of the Union Army but the origins of the Utah Expedition as well. However, notwithstanding the Confederate war records or sympathies of Secretaries Floyd, Cobb, Thompson, and Toucey, it has yet to be established that any or all of them were traitors — let alone prescient ones — as early as the first quarter of 1857. Unlike the matter of Russell, Majors & Waddell, though, there has not been a rigorous, concerted analysis of the personal and official papers of these or other Cabinet officers or, equally important, those of General Scott for January-May 1857, the relevant decision period. An examination of these documents and any surviving papers of Harriet Lane, Buchanan's niece and official White House hostess, James Buchanan Henry, the president's nephew and personal secretary, or John Appleton, the cabinet secretary, may shed light on decisions made by Buchanan early in his administration. The James Buchanan papers in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania yield little on this subject.

Of all the conspiracy theories spawned by the Utah Expedition, perhaps the most complex but promising is that which deals with Kansas affairs — not in the sense of a plan to channel troops into that unhappy territory but rather as a political strategy for syphoning soldiers out of Kansas to Utah. The objective of such a gambit, as Robert Tyler suggested to Buchanan in April 1857, could have been to reduce the public uproar over Kansas by minimizing clashes between federal troops and the various emotional civilian factions in that territory while simultaneously employing the former against Utah's highly unpopular and presumably libidinous Mormons. Although by the summer of 1857 it had become clear that Kansas rather than Utah was Buchanan's greater worry, the president's health, personal style, and reactions to pressure were such as to make it quite possible that the temptation to yield to the public demand for military action against Utah was irresistible during the first quarter of 1857. Here again, a more comprehensive search for and analysis of the papers of those people close to Buchanan's official and personal family is crucial to firm resolution of the conspiracy theories. Until then, Furniss's scholarly but less eclectic analysis of events and motivations stands as the most reliable one.

Even with the passage of 125 years, the origins of the Utah Expedition warrant additional analysis. But then there are several other nonconspiratorial aspects of this campaign and its historiography that also offer intriguing opportunities for exploration. For example, as discussed above, there has not yet been a comprehensive search of the papers of all of Buchanan's Cabinet officers for purposes of studying the decision to intervene in Utah. Neither has there been use made of the trail journal and daguerreotypes — some reproduced for the first time with this article — generated by William Lee, the civilian who accompanied the Utah Expedition's reinforcements in 1858. 41 Similarly, we lack a unit history of the colorful volunteer infantry battalion virtually impressed into the Army of Utah by Albert Sidney Johnston and commanded by Barnard E. Bee. Missing also is a thoughtful analysis of Buchanan's over-all western military policy — not only the Utah Expedition and his related use of the army in Kansas but Buchanan's move to establish an American protectorate over northern Mexico as well as the so-called "Pig War" with Great Britain in the Pacific Northwest. Finally, with a regular army and Nauvoo Legion heavily populated with emigrants, it is intriguing to consider the probability that, in addition to untapped American sources, European archives, manuscript collections, libraries, and attics are loaded with letters and diaries sent home from the Utah Expedition. To date, only Sgt. Eugene Bandel's letters to his Prussian parents from the expedition's Sixth Infantry have been returned to the United States, translated, and published. As yet the letters of Sgt. Maj. William Porter Finlay (Battalion of U.S. Volunteers) and other soldiers remain undiscovered or unpublished. Just as the only surviving copy of the McClellan saddle field tested on this campaign has been located in such an unlikely place as a Danish museum, Europe's and America's trove of documents bearing on the Utah Expedition — along with the key to understanding its origins — await further exploration and eventual discovery during the next 125 years.

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