And the War Came: James Buchanan, The Utah Expedition, and the Decision to Intervene

By WILLIAM P. MACKINNON

“No one has a right to grade a President—not even poor James Buchanan—who has not sat in his chair, examined the mail and information that came across his desk, and learned why he made decisions.”

– President John F. Kennedy to Professor David Herbert Donald, February 1962.

This article’s title springs from the text of Abraham Lincoln’s extraordinary second inaugural address and its recapitulation of the Civil War’s origins. In 1857, Lincoln’s predecessor—James Buchanan—had delivered an inaugural address oblivious to the fact that the country then teetered on the brink of a precursor to Lincoln’s conflict—the Utah War. Significantly Buchanan’s inaugural speech mentioned neither Utah nor Mormons. It certainly did not deal with either Brigham Young or polygamy.1 On the morning that President-elect Buchanan took office, President Franklin Pierce met for the last time with his cabinet. Pierce read aloud a letter summarizing the challenges and accomplishments of their four years together. Missing also from this unpublished valedictory was any reference to matters Mormon, although two years earlier Pierce had tried unsuccessfully to replace Brigham Young as Utah’s governor—an important bit of unfinished business.2 So as the administrations changed on March 4, 1857, Utah was not an issue of frontrank importance for America’s most senior political leaders. Instead, they were preoccupied with the slavery issue, violence in Kansas, and preservation of the Union.

If, on inauguration day, Presidents Pierce and Buchanan ignored the Mormons, they reciprocated. On March 4, 1857, the Deseret News made no mention of the change in national administrations, although it did print the text of Governor Young’s proclamation announcing an election for the Nauvoo Legion’s new commanding general. The News was not to mention Buchanan by name for another three months.3

Five days after the inauguration, the president granted an interview to Utah’s delegate in Congress, John M. Bernhisel. The delegate described this session to Gov. Brigham Young as "pleasant," and noted, "The President appeared free from prejudice himself." Young was optimistic, having written to Thomas L. Kane two months earlier that "We are satisfied with the appointment of Buchanan as future President, we believe he will be a friend to the good, that Fillmore was our friend, but Buchanan will not be a whit behind.”4

Why and how, then, did the Utah War come about? What catapulted “the Mormon problem” from a relatively low priority as Buchanan took office into a burning national issue less than three months later? When did the Buchanan administration decide to replace Young and to intervene in Utah with a large army escort? The answers are difficult, given the mythology and conspiracy theories that have encrusted Buchanan’s decision making. There was no diarist to help later generations plumb the depths of James Buchanan’s mind of the type who recorded decisions by both Pierce’s and Lincoln’s cabinets, but the Utah War’s sesquicentennial provides motivation to probe again the murky matter of that conflict’s origins. This time we are able to do so through the discovery of revealing documents heretofore unexploited by historians.

Perhaps the best foundation for such an examination is the proposition that the Utah War was not the result of a single critical incident that welled up shortly after Buchanan’s inauguration. It was rather the result of a complex chain of interrelated incidents, issues, and forces set in motion a few years after the 1847 Mormon arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. If the Utah War did not end abruptly on June 26, 1858, when Albert Sidney Johnston marched through Salt Lake City, it surely did not just start spontaneously on May 28, 1857, when Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott issued orders to organize the Utah Expedition.5

In many respects, the Utah War was a conflict in the making for nearly ten years. It was a long, tumultuous period during which Mormon-federal relations—already poor in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois—progressively deteriorated in Utah beginning in 1849. By March 1857 there were corrosive disputes involving every aspect of the federal-Mormon interface. The conflicts involved a wide range of secular issues: the quality of mail service, the evenhandedness of criminal justice, land surveys and ownership, the treatment of emigrants crossing Utah, the behavior of U.S. troops, responsibility for the 1853 Gunnison massacre, Indian relations and allegiances, Governor Young’s sometimes volcanic anti-federal rhetoric, his handling of territorial finances and congressional appropriations, and even the accuracy of Utah’s census. Above all else, there were severe disputes over the competence as well as character of Utah’s federal appointees.There were perceptions of Mormon disloyalty to the federal government and a related independence thrust—all intertwined with the failure of Mormon efforts to gain congressional sanction for a State of Deseret in 1849, 1852, and 1856.

Surrounding and compounding these bitterly contested federal-territorial issues were a series of even more volatile religious matters: plural marriage, the doctrine of blood atonement, and—most importantly—Brigham Young’s vision of Utah as a theocratic kingdom (anticipating the Second Coming of Christ) rather than as a conventional territorial ward of Congress functioning through republican principles of government.6 Small wonder that during 1854-55 President Pierce worked actively but ineffectually to replace Young as governor. Nor is it surprising that by the summer of 1856, when the new Republican Party adopted an anti-polygamy mail contractor mistakenly identified as a catalyst for the Utah War campaign platform plank, a violent struggle of some sort might possibly unfold. That who died in Baltimore in 1864 at summer Utah’s Mormon U.S. marshal, Joseph L. Heywood, even dreamt of one while age forty-six. rooming with Apostle George A. Smith in Washington. In Marshal Heywood’s dream, the fighting was to be led by Brigham Young’s second counselor Jedediah M. Grant. 7 Even while complaining about the inefficiences of W.M.F. Magraw’s monthly mail service between Salt Lake City and the east, Mormon leader Erastus Snow commented, “If the Mormon boys rise in the mountains and conquer the world, the fathers in Washington will know nothing of it until it is all over with.” 8

Since early in the twentieth century, the accepted theory of many historians has been that the catalyst for the Utah War—the match in this powder keg—was the impact on the new Buchanan administration of three letters written by some of Brigham Young’s harshest critics: W.M.F. Magraw, a disgruntled former mail contractor; Thomas S. Twiss, an alarmed U.S. Indian agent; and W.W. Drummond, the venomous, debauched associate justice of the Utah supreme court.9 However this theory does not hold under closer examination.

Although Magraw’s letter of October 3, 1856, was written to the president of the United States, the recipient was President Pierce, not then private-citizen James Buchanan. Inflammatory as Magraw’s letter was, there is no indication that Buchanan—elected November 4, 1856—was even aware of it until January 1858 when it surfaced from State Department files.40 Twiss’s letter, dated July 13, 1857, and critical of Mormon encroachment on Sioux lands, did not reach the U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs until well after the Utah Expedition had been decided on and the troops were on the march. Thomas S. Twiss was an eccentric former West Pointer—a classmate of Albert Sidney Johnston—who had resigned his army commission, moved west, married bigamously into a Sioux band and set up his agency in the abandoned Mormon mail station at Deer Creek, Nebraska Territory. Historians of the Plains tribes and Indian relations of the period have viewed Twiss alternately as a brilliant advocate for Indian rights and a manipulative freebooter partial to his Sioux in-laws. General Harney, a problem for the army in his own right, believed Twiss to be a hopeless liability in his pursuit of the tribes and urged Secretary of War Floyd and President Buchanan to remove him.11 Because of long and graphic descriptions elsewhere, Judge Drummond’s character needs no comment here. His volcanic letter of resignation, written to Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black and dated at New Orleans on March 30, 1857, was indeed a bombshell when it received national press distribution in early April. But the impact of Drummond’s resignation letter on cabinet decision-making has been overblown in the absence of an understanding of what had preceded it by several weeks.

The real catalyst for the change in the administration’s priorities and its decisions about Utah was not Drummond’s incendiary resignation letter and the untimely letters from Magraw and Twiss. Rather it was the substance and rhetoric in three other sets of material received quietly but in rapid succession in Washington during the third week of March 1857— weeks before the awareness in early April of Drummond’s resignation and accompanying accusations. This material—largely unpublished—combined with the cumulative impact of nearly ten years of unremitting tension and the anti-polygamy backwash from the 1856 presidential campaign, motivated Buchanan’s cabinet to make two related decisions by early April: replace Brigham Young as governor, and provide his as-yet-unidentified successor with a large army escort of undetermined size. The die was cast, then, long before the late May cabinet meetings accepted by many historians as the critical decision-making date. To assess the dynamics of how Buchanan’s cabinet worked during this important period, one needs to understand the cumulative private-public impact of all of this material as early as March and its sequencing.

In summary, the first of these three sets of material consisted of two memorials and accompanying resolutions adopted by Utah’s legislative assembly on January 6, 1857. These documents—created with input from Brigham Young—dealt with the all-important matter of federal appointments. With the pending change in administrations the legislative assembly had acted to demand that any new appointees for Utah would either be Latter-day Saints or at least sympatico non-Mormons. Upon adoption, these remarkably verbose documents were sent from Salt Lake City to congressional delegate John M. Bernhisel via the Salt Lake-San Bernardino-Panama mail.12 This material arrived in Washington on March 17 simultaneously with publication of a harsh, anti-Mormon New York Herald editorial that argued: “The Utah Mormon excrescence call[s] for immediate and decisive action. That infamous beast, that impudent and blustering imposter, Brigham Young, and his abominable pack of saintly officials, should be kicked out without delay and without ceremony.”13 Ironically, this editorial was the work of the Herald’s driving force, James Gordon Bennett, a man whom Joseph Smith had commissioned a brigadier general in the Nauvoo Legion during the early 1840s.

Because of the relevance of the Utah memorials to the appointments process then preoccupying the new administration, Bernhisel promptly presented them in person to Buchanan on March 18. He did so at a time when Buchanan was exhausted by the demands of filling the federal patronage as well as by his own serious gastrointestinal illness. Unwittingly Bernhisel entered a scene that was an unseemly scramble for Utah positions, especially the governor’s chair. It was a bizarre group of applicants that included James Arlington Bennet, an eccentric Nauvoo Legion major general turned Brooklyn cemetery developer.14 Accordingly the beleaguered president chose not to examine these documents in Bernhisel’s presence. Instead he urged Utah’s congressional delegate to deliver them to one of his chief cabinet officers, Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson. Bernhisel did so later that same day.

When Bernhisel called again on Thompson the next day, March 19, he found to his horror that the provocative language of one of the documents had alarmed the secretary (and presumably the cabinet) to a point that both memorials were interpreted to be a de facto Mormon declaration of war. When Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders learned of this fateful Bernhisel-Thompson confrontation months later from Bernhisel, they immediately viewed this meeting and their petitions as the catalyst for the Utah War. Contributing to the obscurity of these petitions was the fact that in March 1857 Thompson had warned Bernhisel against publishing their text. The implication was that Buchanan viewed them as politically volatile, the stuff form which an uncontrollable national anti-Mormon furor could spring. Even though Brigham Young wanted to publish these petitions, he and Bernhisel acquiesced in Thompson's demand for secrecy. And so, even in Utah, public descriptions of the offending documents were cryptic, incomplete, indirect, and soon forgotten.15 In the federal government, there was no public discussion, although word of the documents' receipt by the administration dribbled into a few low-profile newspapers without other notice until first the Deseret News and then the New York Herald published an incomplete version of the memorials on October 7 and December 15, 1857.

What may well have stimulated Thompson’s fateful comments to delegate Bernhisel was the second batch of Utah materials received in Washington that week: a letter from Judge Drummond to an unidentified cabinet officer—presumably Attorney General Black—that appeared in the capital on the same day as the Bernhisel-Thompson meeting. Drummond had probably written this letter before boarding ship in California and before his resignation letter written on March 30 from New Orleans. After reciting a list of what he considered to be Mormon abuses, Drummond grew prescriptive: “Let all, then, take hold and crush out one of the most treasonable organizations in America.” 16

Stunned by Thompson’s unanticipated reaction to the Utah petitions, if not Drummond’s California letter, Bernhisel made what seems to have been both a strange and fateful decision. Instead of swinging into action to moderate the administration’s alarmed reaction, Bernhisel withdrew from the fray, left Washington, and travelled to Pennsylvania to visit relatives. He then wrote a discouraging report to Brigham Young on April 2, and took his seat on the early May Salt Lake-bound mail stage from Independence, Missouri. His unfortunate departure from the capital created a vacuum in Mormon representation at the very time when it was most needed. 17

The day after Thompson informed Bernhisel of the cabinet’s explosive reaction, another shoe dropped in Washington—this time in the form of two letters written to Jeremiah Black, the U.S. Attorney General, by Utah’s chief justice, John F. Kinney.The judge was then in Washington on leave of absence. His letters constituted the third wave of Utah-related materials received by the administration that week. In one of his March 20 letters, presumably hand-delivered, Kinney reviewed at length the condition of affairs in Utah. This document was remarkably like the resignation letter Drummond was then formulating aboard ship in the Gulf of Mexico, and it urged Attorney General Black to share Kinney’s views with the president and his cabinet just as Drummond’s California letter, received the day before, had asked. Kinney did not write spontaneously; Black had asked for his assessment of Utah affairs probably after reading Drummond’s California letter and after Bernhisel had delivered the memorials of January 6 to Thompson on March 18. On March 20 Kinney not only recited examples of what he believed to be Brigham Young’s perversion of Utah’s judicial system, he urged Young’s removal from office and the establishment of a one-regiment U.S. Army garrison in the territory.18

The second letter that Kinney gave to Attorney General Black on March 20 was a document transmitting an enclosed letter from Utah Surveyor General David H. Burr. Burr was a long-time critic of Brigham Young’s handling of such disputed federal-territorial issues as disposition of the public lands and Indian affairs. Sandwiched among his new litany of alleged Mormon offenses was Burr’s shocking assessment that, “The great danger to a [new] Governor would be assassination.” Notwithstanding his identification of this risk, Burr argued for something other than a large army expedition to carry out his recommendations: “To carry out this plan the presence of a small Military force might be necessary. I do not suppose that their services would be needed further than to show the leaders of this people a determination to enforce the laws.”19

Delivery of the Burr letter meant that within two weeks of taking office James Buchanan and his cabinet had a collection of stunning new inputs on Utah affairs from the territory’s truculent legislative assembly, its chief justice, an associate supreme court justice, and the surveyor-general. All of these documents were suppressed and never shared with Congress, although the full cabinet was surely aware of them.

From the cabinet’s viewpoint, Kinney’s inputs must have carried substantial credibility at face value, as would those of “General” Burr. Prior to his appointment to Utah’s bench in 1854, Kinney had been a justice on Iowa’s supreme court. His experience in Utah was relatively long and recent, credentials that Kinney believed qualified him to comment about the territory, as he phrased it, “advisedly.” Both the U.S. Department of State and the office of the U.S. Attorney General had files amassed during President Pierce’s administration that bulged with “confidential” Kinney reports criticizing Brigham Young’s influence on Utah’s judicial and law enforcement systems. Probably unknown to the Buchanan cabinet in March 1857 was Kinney’s 1855 indictment in Salt Lake City’s probate court on gambling charges, his ownership of a disreputable hotel frequented by young girls and older men seeking companionship, and the extent to which he had boldly but unsuccessfully maneuvered for appointment as Utah’s governor two years earlier. David H. Burr would have been even better known to the cabinet than Kinney. Although Mormon leaders would soon begin an intense attack on Burr’s character and professional performance, in March he would have been known in Washington as a nationally famous cartographer who had been employed by both the U.S. House of Representatives and the State of New York.

Once Judge Drummond became the center of national attention in early April 1857, he stoked his now-famous anti-Mormon vendetta through a series of similar letters. Some of these were written in April and May for public consumption by a nation unaware of his character flaws. In private Drummond also wrote to both Attorney General Black and Sen. Stephen A. Douglas to threaten destruction of the administration and the entire Democratic Party if they failed to act on Utah as he wanted. On April 2— the day that he mailed his resignation from New Orleans—Drummond had reported to a friend, “I have stirred the waters of the Saints and shall keep up the war in all time to come ... A new Government and Military aid will be sent to Utah now mark it, and Brigham Young will starve from under the appointments of the Federal Government.... I may go to Utah as Governor. If so look out for a merry time. I will take it with military aid.”20 Later, unsure if Buchanan would indeed take action, Drummond wrote to Douglas angrily, “I think I will make open war on this Admin. on this dread question.... [I will] make it as hot as Judge Black and the President can well bear it ...”21 It is now known that Drummond met with Black and perhaps the entire Buchanan cabinet. Such threats may have had a significant impact on Senator Douglas’s decision to include an attack on the Mormons in his now famous Springfield speech a few weeks later on June 12. This was an address that stimulated a little-known rebuttal speech from a member of Douglas’s audience, lawyer Abraham Lincoln, and produced Mormon enmity against Douglas lasting to this day. 22

In the midst of all this turmoil, Thomas L. Kane of Philadelphia, Brigham Young’s oldest and best-connected non-Mormon friend, tried covertly to lobby President Buchanan to retain Young as Utah’s governor.23 He did so on March 21 at Young’s urgent request, but a pessimistic Kane reported to Young later that month, “Mr. Buchanan is a timerous man, as well as just now an overworked one.”24 Armed with very recent inputs from Drummond, Kinney, and Burr as well as provocative petitions from Salt Lake City, Buchanan rebuffed Kane’s request and would not even see him. Here was a demoralizing slight which, along with a myriad of personal and family problems, drove Kane to withdraw from Mormon affairs until the next fall.

Kane’s departure from the fray was a devastating blow to the Mormon cause at just the wrong time. As he retired to the mountains of western Pennsylvania, Kane wrote to Young: “We can place no reliance upon the President: he succumbs in more respects than one to outside pressure. You can see from the papers how clamorous it is for interference with Utah affairs. Now Mr. Buchanan has not heart enough to save his friends from being thrown over to stop the mouths of a pack of Yankee editors.”25 This was a lobbying gap aggravated by delegate Bernhisel’s decision in April to leave the arena of Mormon-federal conflicts and Brigham Young’s own incommunicado status during the five weeks of his unauthorized April-May departure from Utah for the even more remote wilderness of southern Oregon Territory. By late May 1857 Drummond’s accusations were augmented by telegraphic reports from Missouri sent to Washington by other returning federal officers, nearly all of whom had fled Utah on April 15. The first of these departees to reach the Atlantic Coast was John M. Hockaday, U.S. attorney for Utah as well as a former business partner of letter-writer W.M.F. Magraw. Hockaday met for hours on April 27 with the shadowy James C. Van Dyke, James Buchanan’s closest political advisor in Philadelphia. After leaving Van Dyke, Hockaday moved on to visit, and presumably influence, Buchanan. 26

Adding to the sensationalism of reports from Utah’s fleeing federal appointees was a series of graphic editorial attacks on Drummond’s character and credibility in the LDS church’s Manhattan newspaper, The Mormon. These attacks reflected the no-holds-barred style of its editor, Apostle John Taylor. Through his deputy editor, William I. Appleby—a former New Jersey judge—Taylor launched an intensive investigation and exposé of Drummond’s libertine behavior in Illinois, Washington, and Utah. Taylor and Appleby published the seamy results in a way that largely destroyed Drummond’s reputation. But they did so with the unintended consequence of also fueling public fascination with Drummond’s accusations of Mormon misconduct. This was explosive material that had been requested by and provided to Kane and that he privately transmitted to Attorney General Black.27 It was an approach that kept the pot of Utah controversy roiling rather than putting “the Mormon problem” to rest, especially after Drummond became aware through leaks to him from the cabinet about Kane’s efforts to advise Buchanan and Black. With this realization, Drummond publicly cudgeled Kane through pseudonymous letters to newspaper editors. This intimidating counterattack by Drummond, in turn, also sapped a distracted Kane’s willingness to help the Mormons at this critical juncture.28

A parallel Mormon attack on Utah’s surveyor general, David H. Burr, focused on public accusations—some warranted—that his work was riddled with nepotism, incompetence, and corruption. These were charges that stained Burr’s otherwise sterling reputation, broke his health, and prolonged territorial-federal finger-pointing well into 1859 and beyond.

It was now clear that the old Pierce strategy of benign neglect—continuation in office for Young through presidential inaction—was no longer viable. The incendiary rhetoric of the documents received privately during the third week of March destroyed any vestige of presidential confidence in Brigham Young. In March Buchanan began to offer Utah’s governorship to multiple candidates, all of whom declined the post. Drummond’s March-April advice had been for a military as well as political remedy, and Buchanan had received similar counsel for military action privately in late March from Utah Chief Justice Kinney and Surveyor General Burr. In late April Buchanan also heard from Robert Tyler, another close advisor in Philadelphia who was the son of former President John Tyler. He advised Buchanan to use the army in an anti- Mormon “crusade” to divert public attention from the slavery conflict in Kansas. 29 The president made no response to such advice, but he created the appearance that he was first focusing on a political solution rather than army intervention. Nonetheless, consideration of the military option indeed bubbled below the surface.

It is likely that by late March or early April the notion of some sort of army escort for Young’s successor had gelled in the cabinet along with the decision to replace Young. Surely those men whom Buchanan approached about Utah’s governorship in March raised the question of military support. For example, Robert J. Walker had done so soon after the inauguration before agreeing to become Kansas’s governor. Through such negotiations, Walker had obtained from Buchanan a commitment that General Harney and the Second U.S. Dragoons would be in Kansas to help him maintain order in that troubled territory. It is even more likely that candidates for Utah’s governorship also raised the matter of military backing with the president. To this point, we know that Alfred Cumming’s eventual appointment to succeed Young was delayed until mid-July so that he could travel to Fort Leavenworth to review arrangements for the Utah Expedition.

Precisely when and how the cabinet arrived at a firm decision to intervene militarily is murky. The mysterious, abrupt April 6 transfer of General Harney from command of the Seminole War in Florida to Kansas for undisclosed reasons triggered rampant rumors. Newspaper editors and army officers alike speculated that a campaign against the Mormons was taking shape. 30

In 1960, without citing evidence other than the speculation of contemporary press accounts—many of them wildly inaccurate—historian Norman F. Furniss identified a cabinet meeting on or about May 20 as crucial. Furniss viewed that session as the one at which the administration decided upon military as well as political intervention.31 More accurately, the basic decision had been made almost two months earlier, but the cabinet was nervously trying to get comfortable with such a decision in private while Buchanan frantically sought someone willing to take Utah’s governorship. Among the imponderables being weighed by the administration during this recruitment was the advice of Kinney and Burr for a relatively small force and Drummond’s conflicting demand for a far larger expedition. On May 16 Drummond ranted to Douglas, “I have had an interview with Atty. Gen. Black today on Utah, and find him as ignorant as a man can be. Cannot for the life of him appreciate the power of the Mormons. He says they will enforce the laws in Utah and intimates that 1,000 [military] men will do it.” 32 At the end of May, a hulking, three hundred-pound Gen. Winfield Scott entered the fray. He did so very late in the game and without conviction.

Among the important but obscure documents created during this crucial period was an extraordinary memorandum that Scott wrote on May 26 from his self-exile in New York to Secretary Floyd. In this document Scott argued that a campaign in Utah would be ill-fated unless postponed until the spring of 1858. He pleaded that if there was to be an expedition for Utah about four thousand troops were needed, but he conceded that he could make do with as few as twenty-five hundred.33 Such a force would have been several multiples beyond what Kinney and Burr had earlier recommended. It was more like the implied scope of the anti-Mormon “crusade” recommended on April 27 by Robert Tyler. Even though Scott had traveled to Washington by May 27 and undoubtedly hand delivered this paper to the War Department, Floyd never acknowledged receiving it. Ten years later Buchanan pointedly denied even knowing of the Scott memorandum, let alone rejecting its sound advice. 34 Notwithstanding his counsel to Floyd for delay, on May 28, 1857, Scott announced to the army’s staff departments that there was to be a twenty-five hundred man Utah Expedition and tasked them with its immediate support.What happened to unsettle General Scott’s world and overrule his advice during the two days between May 26 and 28, 1857, is one of the remaining mysteries surrounding the Utah War’s origins.

In his 1864 memoirs General Scott further clouded the issue of why and how the Buchanan cabinet decided to launch the Utah Expedition by introducing the notion of Secretary of War Floyd’s 1857 behavior. Scott did so in the midst of the Civil War—a time when he and former President Buchanan were publicly jousting over their roles in the secession crisis of 1860-61 and a time when it was well known that Floyd had gone south to become a Confederate brigadier general. With his 1864 comments, Scott gratuitously added fuel to a Utah War conspiracy theory that Brigham Young had helped to launch in August 1857—the notion that at the heart of the Utah Expedition was the Buchanan administration’s corrupt desire to enrich commercial friends such as the western freighting firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell. General Scott wrote:

Former President Buchanan believed with justification that Scott’s accusation was groundless, although defending Floyd in 1864 was difficult because of his wartime status as traitor. Also complicating a dispassionate view of Floyd’s 1857 decisions was the fact that his subsequent irregularities in financing the Utah War had forced his resignation from the cabinet in December 1860.36 Within a few months of leaving office, Buchanan was so skeptical of Scott’s memoranda and letters to newspapers that he told one editor, “…[it]has been often said of the gallant general that when he abandons the sword for the pen, he makes sad work of it.”37

These yawning communication gaps between the most senior federal leaders were emblematic of conflict, indifference, and ineffectiveness atop the U.S. Army. 38 Notwithstanding periodic bouts of severe back pain, an inexperienced but highly confident Secretary Floyd intended to run military affairs during the Buchanan administration unaided by Scott. General Scott, who had unilaterally removed army headquarters from Washington to New York during the late 1840s in a fit of pique, lacked the interpersonal skills and even physical presence to bridge the polite but real chasm dividing him and Floyd. President Buchanan was temperamentally and experientially ill-equipped to understand that these disconnects existed let alone deal with their consequences. For political reasons Buchanan and Floyd took another precious month after the late May 28 release of General Scott’s announcement of the Utah Expedition to name its commander and to draft his operational instructions.These orders—signed by a lieutenant colonel acting for Scott—declared Utah to be in a state of rebellion, something that the president himself neglected to say publicly until the next December and even then only in confusing fashion. These were interpersonal relationships, communication behaviors, and timing insensitivities disastrous for the way in which the Utah Expedition was to be organized and led. 39

It is intriguing but unnoticed that when the critical decisions on Utah were being made in the spring of 1857, James Buchanan, Brigham Young, Thomas L. Kane, General Scott, and Secretary of War Floyd were all men with serious medical problems ranging from the life-threatening to the mysterious. None of these key people were functioning at the top of their games. Even the Utah Expedition’s initial commander, General William S. Harney, had self-control and emotional problems so severe that by the spring of 1857 the army had court-martialed him four times and a civilian court in St. Louis had tried Harney a fifth time for torturing and bludgeoning to death a defenseless female slave. The nature of Buchanan’s afflictions were so severe and communication lags so daunting that during August 1857 Brigham Young and General Wells speculated amongst themselves that the president might be dead.40 In terms of communication he was. Buchanan’s first public discussion of the Utah War in any form came in a brief five-paragraph commentary in his December 8, 1857, first annual message to Congress, a silence stunning by its length and implications. 41

Both James Buchanan and Brigham Young were highly capable leaders, but each was ill in the late winter of 1857 and lacked military experience. They reacted ineffectively to the powerful social, political, and religious forces afoot by placing large numbers of armed men in motion under murky, sometimes conflicting orders. The results were fateful as well as expensive in terms of blood and treasure. There were also devastating reputational consequences. This damage lingers to this day in unfortunate ways on both Mormon and federal sides of the conflict. The LDS church as an institution still grapples with the stain of Mountain Meadows, the Utah War’s greatest atrocity. Brigham Young’s personal reputation was tarnished by his three Utah War-related indictments for treason and murder and the execution for mass murder of his adopted son, John D. Lee.42 For its part the U.S. Army still prefers to forget the embarrassment of the Utah Expedition and its uncomfortable winter spent in the charred ruins of Fort Bridger on half-rations. For James Buchanan the Utah War was, in many ways, the beginning of the destruction of his personal reputation, as he presided ineffectively over the nation’s slide toward disunion. Feelings against Buchanan ran so high during the Civil War that members of his Masonic lodge stood guard over his retirement home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The damage to Buchanan’s reputation was so long-lasting that a monument to him was not erected in Washington until the 1930s, although his niece had covered the full expenses for such a tribute forty years earlier.

And the war came—first as an unprecedented, atrocious armed confrontation between Americans in Utah Territory and then as a monumental bloodbath in Virginia.

Copyright 2007, William P MacKinnon. The author has adapted this article from At Sword’s Point, his documentary history of the Utah war (forthcoming from the Arthur H. Clark Co., an imprint of the University of Oklahoma Press), as well as from a paper of similar title presented at Mormon History m Association annual conference, Salt Lake City, May 25, 2007 The author thanks Professor s David H Miller, Cameron University, and Thomas G Alexander, Brigham Young University, for their generosity in sharing documents, Ardis E. Par shall for her research and administrative help, and Patricia H. MacKinnon for her personal and editorial support.

1 James Buchanan, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1857, John Bassett Moore, ed , The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence 12 vols. (New York: Antiquarian Press Ltd., 1960), 10:105-13.

2 Franklin Pierce, Letter to Cabinet, March 4, 1857, J. Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

3 “Proclamation,” Deseret News, March 4, 1857, and “The Inauguration,” June 10, 1857.

4 John M. Bernhisel to Brigham Young, March 17, 1857, and Brigham Young, Letter to Thomas Kane, January 31, 1857, both in Family and Church History Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Hereafter LDS Church History Library

5 William P MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War : Impact and Legacy,” Journal of Mormon History 29 (Fall 2003):186-248.

6 In addition to David L. Bigler’s article in this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly, the most recent and complete discussion of this long list of pre-1857 secular and religious points of conflict appear s in four other works by Bigler : Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Spokane: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1998), 1-199; A Winter with the Mormons: The 1852 Letters of Jotham Goodell (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Tanner Trust, 2001), 1-19; “Sources of Conflict: Mormons and Their Neighbor s, 1830-90,” lecture delivered to the Salt Lake Theological Seminar y, July 25, 2003, photocopy in my possession; and “Theocracy Versus Republic: ‘The Irrepressible Conflict,’” paper delivered at the Mormon History Association annual conference, May 2006, Casper, Wyoming. See also MacKinnon, “Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40 (Spring 2007): 53-54.

7 Diary of Joseph L Heywood, entry for July 31, 1856, <http://contentsm lib byu edu/Diaries/image/4269.pdf> accessed April 16, 2007.

8 Erastus Snow to Orson Spencer, October 1, 1855, “Letter from Prest. E. Snow,” St. Louis Luminary, November 10, 1855.

9 A classic case for the significance of these three letter s appear s in Leland Hargrave Creer, Utah and the Nation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1929), 117-26. For the match/powder keg metaphor, I am indebted to Leo V Gordon and Richard Vetterli, Powderkeg (Novato, CA: Lyford Books, 1991), a novel about the Utah War An even earlier use of this metaphor appear s in Robert Richmond, “Some Wester n Editor s View the Mormon War, 1857-1858,” Trail Guide 8 (March 1963): 3. For an analysis of these three documents, see William P MacKinnon, “The Buchanan Spoils System and the Utah Expedition: Careers of W.M.F Mag raw and John M. Hockaday,” Utah Historical Quar terly 31 (Spring 1963): 127-50.

10 This letter had been filed with State Department records because in 1856 Secretary of State William L. Marcy bore administrative responsibility for most territorial affairs. Even as astute a researcher as Dale L. Morgan mistakenly assumed that Buchanan was the “Mr President” to whom Mag raw wrote a month before the election of 1856 Morgan, research notes on Buchanan and Utah Expedition, Madeline R McQuown Collection, Marriott Library , University of Utah, Salt Lake City

11 William S Harney to John B Floyd, August 8, 1857, Records, Office of the Adjt Gen , Letter s Received (Record Group 94), National Archives.

“Memorial and Resolutions to the President of the United States, Concerning Certain Officer s of the Territory of Utah” and “Memorial to the President of the United States,” by the Utah Territory Legislative Assembly, January 6, 1857, holograph copies retained in Utah State Archives, Salt Lake City A rough draft with editorial emendations is in the Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library W A. Hickman was recommended by the legislative assembly to be appointed U.S attorney for Utah. In view of Hickman’s reputation as “notorious” and his later status as a self-confessed killer, it is interesting to consider the legislature’s recommendation.

“Mr Buchanan’s Administration and Our Foreign and Domestic Affair s, ” New York Herald, March 17, 1857.

14 Ardis E. Parshall, “Brigham Young’s Support of Buchanan Proved Ironic as Utah War Unfolded,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 2007. For a discussion of the three Bennet[t]s whom Joseph Smith had commissioned as Leg ion generals and their colorful Utah War involvements, see MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War,” 213. See also Lyndon W Cook, “James Arlington Bennet and the Mormons, ” BYU Studies 19 (1979): 247-49.

15 John M. Bernhisel, Letter to Brigham Young, April 2, 1857, Brigham Young Collection, LDS Church History Library Neither Bernhisel nor the Buchanan administration ever submitted these documents to Congress, disregarding normal procedure and even the House of Representatives’ subsequent special yearend demand that Buchanan produce all materials shedding light on the extent to which Utah was in a state of rebellion. This treatment was in marked contrast to the wide and immediate publicity given to the even more inflammatory memorial adopted by the Utah legislative assembly a year later on January 6, 1858, and sent to the U.S. House of Representatives. A federal g rand jury sitting at Camp Scott returned an indictment of treason against ever y man who signed the 1858 memor ial.

16 W W Drummond, Letter to unspecified cabinet officer, “Utah and Its Troubles , ” March 19, 1857 dispatch from Washington, New York Herald, March 20, 1857 The text of this letter cannot be located in government files; our only awareness of it is through the excerpts reported by the Herald’ s Washington correspondent

17 Bernhisel’s April 2, 1857, report to Brigham Young remains unpublished. He wrote it too late to be included in the April mail to Salt Lake City, and so, ironically, this document traveled west in the same coach with Bernhisel a month later The letter arrived at its destination on May 29, 1857, just after the governor’s return from a five-week trek to Fort Limhi and the day following the release of General Scott’s circular initiating the Utah Expedition.

18 John F Kinney to Jeremiah S Black, March 20, 1857, photocopy of holograph in my possession, together with the typed transcription, courtesy of Professor David H. Miller, Cameron Univer sity This letter is marked “Confidential & Private” in a hand other than Kinney’s. The only known published reference (but not the text) to this important document is a simple listing in the bibliography for James F Varley, Brigham and the Brigadier, General Patrick Connor and His California Volunteers in Utah and along the Overland Trail (Tucson: Westernlore Press, 1989), 309. Kinney’s relationship with the Mormons was highly ambivalent over an extended period of time Star ting in 1855 Brigham Young accurately suspected the judge of joining other disaffected federal appointees in writing anti-Mor mon reports to Washington, behavior that Kinney vehemently denied while simultaneously courting Mor mon approbation. Howard Lamar refer s to Kinney during this period as “busily playing the double game of cooperating with the Mormons on the local level while bombarding Washington with secret strictures against Young.” Howard Roberts Lamar, The Far Southwest, 1846-1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 331; Michael W Homer, “The Federal Bench and Priesthood Authority: The Rise and Fall of John Fitch Kinney’s Early Relationship with the Mormons, ” Journal of Mormon History 13 (1986-87): 89-108.

19 The undated David H. Bur r to Jeremiah Black letter may have been received by Kinney with the same batch of mail that arrived in Washington (via the Salt Lake-San Bernardino-Panama route) yielding letter s for Black and Bernhisel from Drummond and Utah’s legislative assembly, respectively, on March 17 and 19. To date, the only notice of the Burr to Black letter (transmitted on March 20, 1857 by Kinney) appears in Thomas G Alexander, “Carpetbaggers, Reprobates, and Liar s: Federal Judges and the Utah War,” unpublished paper for Mormon History Association’s annual conference, Salt Lake City, May 2007, 19 note 49. Burr’s concerns about threats to his safety and mail security appear in David H. Burr to Thomas A. Hendricks, February 5, and June 11, 1857, “The Utah Expedition,” House Ex. Doc 71 (35-1), Serial 956, 118-21; Bur r to Hendricks, December 31, 1856, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City

20 Quoted in Donald R. Moor man, with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992; reprinted 2005), 12 and 284 note 23.

21 W.W. Drummond to Stephen A. Douglas, May 16, 1857, Stephen A. Douglas papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

22 Stephen A. Douglas, “Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision,” Springfield, Illinois, June 12, 1857, 11-15 (pamphlet in author’s possession). For a description of this speech and its reception, see Robert W Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: oxford University Press, 1973), 556-75. For the enraged Mormon rebuttal to Douglas’s speech, see “Comments Upon the Remarks of Hon Stephen Arnold Douglas,” Deseret News, September 2, 1857. These two Springfield speeches of June 1857 likely provided the template for the Lincoln-Douglas debates that followed in 1858.

23 Thomas L. Kane to James Buchanan, march 21, 1857, Kane Collection. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

24 Thomas L. Kane to Brigham Young, ca. March 1857, Thomas L. Kane Papers, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.

25 Thomas L. Kane to Br igham Young, May 21, 1857, Yale Collection of Wester n Americana, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

26 Hockaday’s visit to Philadelphia and the recommendation that he visit the president is described in James C. Van Dyke to James Buchanan, April 27, 1857, The James Buchanan Papers, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

27 Thomas L. Kane to Jeremiah S Black, Ap il 27, 1857, Black Paper s, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

28 “Verastus,” to Editor, May 24, 1857, printed as “Col. Thomas L. Kane on Mormonism,” New York Daily Times, May 26, 1857. Multiple historians view "Verastus" as the pen name adopted by W.W. Drummond.

29 Robert Tyler to James Buchanan, April 27, 1857, The James Buchanan Papers, The Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For the text see also Philip G Auchampaugh, Robert Tyler, Southern Rights Champion 18471866: A Documentary Study Chiefly of Antebellum Politics (Duluth, MN.: Himan Stein, 1934), 180-81; David A. Williams, “President Buchanan Receives a Proposal for an Anti-Mormon Crusade, 1857,” Brigham Young University Studies 14 (Autumn 1973): 103-105. Williams’ judgment was: “The fact that it could be seriously advanced by a son of a former president to the incumbent President in and of itself makes it a significant document in the political history of Mormonism in America.”

30 2d Lt. George Dashiell Bayard to Samuel J Bayard, April 15, 1857, in Samuel J Bayard, Life of George Dashiell Bayard (New York: G.P Putnam’s, 1874), 114-17.

31 Norman F Furniss, The Mormon Conflict 1850-1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 63.

32 W W Drummond to Stephen A Douglas, May 16, 1857, Douglas Paper s, University of Chicago Library

33 “Garrison for Salt-Lake City,” Brevet Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, Memorandum for Secretar y of War, May 26, 1857, Headquarter s of the Army, Letter s Sent (Record Group 108), National Archives. The only published text of this remarkable memo appear s in M. Hamlin Cannon, “Winfield Scott and the Utah Expedition,” Military Affairs: Journal of the American Military Institute 5 (Fall 1941): 109-11.

34 James Buchanan, Mr Buchanan’s Administration on the Eve of the Rebellion (New York: D Appleton & Co., 1866), 238-39.

35 Winfield Scott, Memoirs of Lieut.-General Scott, L.L.D., Written by Himself 2 vols. (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1864), 2:604. Scott, like Buchanan, wrote his memoir s in the third per son.

36 William P MacKinnon, “125 Year s of Conspiracy Theor ies: Or ig ins of the Utah Expedition of 185758,” Utah Histor ical Quar terly 52 (Summer 1984): 212-30.

37 James Buchanan to Gerard Hallock, June 29, 1861, cited in William H. Hallock, Life of Gerard Hallock, Editor of the New York Journal of Commerce (1869 New York: Arno Press, 1970, rep.), 242.

38 For a more complete discussion of these leader ship shortfalls and the points covered in summary fashion in the balance of this article, see MacKinnon, “‘Lonely Bones’: Leader ship and Utah War Violence,” Journal of Mormon History 33 (Spr ing 2007): 121-78.

39 See MacKinnon, “‘Who’s in Charge Here?’: Command Ambiguity and Cross Cur rents Atop the Utah Expedition,” unpublished paper, 55th Annual Utah State History Conference, September 7, 2007, Salt Lake City

40 Young and Wells quoted in entry for August 2, 1857, Scott G Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, 1833-1898 9 vols. (Midvale: Signature Books, 1983-1985), 5:71-2.

41 James Buchanan, “First Annual Message,” December 8, 1857, Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, 10:151-54.

42 The texts for these three indictments are unpublished. They were quashed under unusual circumstances described in MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War,” 245 note 14; Edwin Brown Fir mage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 138, 144-47.