"Liberty to the Downtrodden": Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer 9780300153262

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“Liberty to the Downtrodden”

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“Liberty to the Downtrodden” Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer

Matthew J. Grow

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. Copyright © 2009 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Set in Electra Roman types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Durham, North Carolina. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Grow, Matthew J. Liberty to the downtrodden : Thomas L. Kane, romantic reformer / Matthew J. Grow p. cm. “Published with assistance from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies”—P. iv. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-13610-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Kane, Thomas Leiper, 1822–1883. 2. Kane, Thomas Leiper, 1822–1883—Relations with Mormons. 3. Mormons—West (U.S.)—History—19th century. 4. Mormon pioneers—Utah—History—19th century. 5. Utah Expedition (1857–1858) 6. Utah—History—19th century. 7. Mormon Church— United States—History—19th century. 8. Social reformers—United States—Biography. 9. Abolitionists—United States—Biography. 10. Soldiers—United States—Biography. I. Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. II. Title. F826.K27G76 2009 979.2'02092—dc22 [B] 2008035043 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). It contains 30 precent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). 10

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To Alyssa

I will not dissemble my hope, that each person whom I address has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip along through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man, who must find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him, to go in honor and with benefit. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” January 25, 1841 I shall aim to be an earnest missionary of Truth and Progress and Reform. It is my fixed belief that our Society must be reformed, or from natural causes perish. —Thomas L. Kane to Brigham Young, September 24, 1850

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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ONE Raising Kane TWO Europe

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THREE Beginnings of Reform

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FOUR Meeting the Mormons

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FIVE The Suffering Saints

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SIX Free Soil and Young America SEVEN Fugitive Slaves

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EIGHT Reforming Marriage

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NINE The Utah War, Act I

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TEN The Utah War, Act II

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ELEVEN Honor, Reform, and War TWELVE Developing Kane

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Contents THIRTEEN Anti-Anti-Polygamy Epilogue

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Appendix: Kane Family Chart Notes 289 Index

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Acknowledgments

Writing a book involves a curious mix of solitude and community. To thank the community that made this book possible is a pleasure. First written as a doctoral dissertation at Notre Dame, this study bears the imprint of a remarkable committee. George Marsden has been an ideal adviser, providing freedom to choose a topic and an approach, giving advice when needed, and exemplifying how to be a productive scholar and a gracious human being. The other members of my committee—Jim Turner, Tom Slaughter, John McGreevy, and Sally Gordon—not only slogged through the dissertation (which weighed in almost twice as long as this book), but provided encouragement and challenged my thinking throughout the process. The archivists and staff members at various institutions greatly assisted my research. David Whittaker, who arranged for the purchase of Brigham Young University’s Kane Collection and supervised the compilation of its indispensable register, was particularly supportive. Knowledgeable on all things Kane, he provided sound advice, encouraged my work, allowed me to examine unprocessed material, and read my manuscript. At the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Ron Watt and Steve Sorensen provided valuable assistance. In addition, I thank archivists at the following institutions: the American Philosophical Society, Dartmouth College Library, the Archives and Special Collections at Dickinson College, Henry E. Huntington Library, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, the Library of Congress, McKean County Historical Society, Pennsylvania State Archives, the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. National Archives, and the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

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Acknowledgments

I owe debts to numerous other scholars. Sally Gordon, Bruce Dorsey, Mel Piehl, Kathleen Flake, and Paul Reeve commented on portions of this book at various conferences. David Waldstreicher provided crucial direction as I chose my topic and formulated my approach. Ardis Parshall gave me copies of transcripts of Brigham Young letters. Mark Sawin shared his expertise on the Kane family and gave me a copy of his fascinating book manuscript on Thomas’s brother Elisha. Besides graciously tutoring me in all things related to the Utah War, Bill MacKinnon closely read my Utah War chapters; his sharp eye for detail, deep knowledge of the Utah War, and sense for good prose greatly improved my writing. Fellow graduate students at Notre Dame—especially Patrick Mason, Mike DeGruccio, Tim Gloege, Bryan Smith, and the members of the Colloquium on Religion and History—read chapters, providing both key insights and important moral support. Richard Bushman and Jan Shipps both read the entire manuscript and their advice has proved extremely valuable. A portion of this book was published in the fall 2005 issue of Utah Historical Quarterly as “‘I Have Given Myself to the Devil’: Thomas L. Kane and the Culture of Honor.” I’m grateful for the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers for the UHQ as well as for the assistance of editor Kent Powell. This book has also very much benefited from the editing of Chris Rogers, Laura Davulis, and Jessie Dolch at Yale University Press. Generous funding from the following sources allowed me to travel to archives from New Hampshire to Utah: a Dissertation Research Grant from the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History at Brigham Young University, a Zahm Research Travel Fund Grant from the University of Notre Dame, a Dissertation Research Grant from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and a Humane Studies Fellowship from the Institute for Humane Studies. My parents Robert and Linda Grow have read and improved almost everything of significance I have written since, well, I began to write. This book is no exception. During the summer in which I began my research, my parents provided a home close to the Utah archives and plenty of free babysitting. My parents-in-law Paul and Beverly Bawden gave my family similar accommodations on shorter research trips to Utah, as well as emotional support. My sister Lisa Grow Sun read the entire manuscript (even the notes!) with her perceptive eye for detail and clear writing. David, my brother, cleaned up the footnotes and pulled together the bibliography in the week before I turned in the dissertation. Our first son, Caleb, arrived during the fall of my second year of graduate school and is now old enough to ask why my story of Tom Kane is so long (a question others have found exceptionally insightful). The ratio of words to pictures is also disappointing to him. Elsie had the good sense to arrive in the weeklong

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break between the written and oral components of my comprehensive exams, evoking enough sympathy, I suspect, to ensure my passage. Following his sister’s example, Keegan was born two weeks before my dissertation defense, arriving just in time to likewise generate needed sympathy. My wife, Alyssa, deserves the greatest thanks. Her willingness to travel—including a summer in Utah only a few weeks after Elsie’s birth and a few nights at the “haunted” Kane Mansion in Kane, Pennsylvania—made research trips infinitely better. Alyssa encouraged me throughout the process, patiently listened to hundreds of stories on the Kanes, endured my complaints, read the manuscript, and gave me advice on matters of both substance and style. Dedicating this story to her is the smallest of acknowledgments that she has not only improved this book, but bettered my life in every way.

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Introduction

On the night of March 12, 1858, as a federal army shivered in a makeshift camp on the Wyoming plains, a solitary horseman approached. The messenger identified himself as Colonel Thomas L. Kane and presented credentials from President James Buchanan. The army officers recognized Kane, then thirty-six years old, as a member of a prominent Philadelphia family, the son of a federal judge, and the brother of a recently deceased Arctic explorer and national hero. Kane’s own reputation had also preceded him, and rumors quickly circulated through the camp that he had troubling ties to the Mormons, whose alleged rebellion the army had been sent to quell. During the previous decade, Kane had emerged as the most ardent and persuasive nineteenth-century defender of the religious rights of the much reviled Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Though he rejected their religion, Kane saw the Latter-day Saints as the ideal object of his reforming energies and sought to defend the Mormons from the “Holy War” waged against them by evangelical America.¹ In 1857, the conflict between the Mormons and the nation intensified when newly elected Buchanan placed the “Mormon Question” at the top of his agenda and, to ensure federal supremacy in Utah, dispatched the largest military expedition between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. The Mormons, remembering their previous government-sanctioned expulsions from Missouri and Illinois, pledged to resist. The resulting confrontation (called the Utah War) has largely been forgotten, obscured by the Civil War, which began three years later. In 1857 and 1858, just as many Americans had their eyes on the events in Utah—with their tantalizing mix of religion, violence, sexual deviance, high politics, and the American West—as they did on the events in Bleeding Kansas and the sectional crisis.

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Widespread hostility against Mormonism, the most despised religion of the nineteenth century, made the military action possible. The episode marked the largest attempt by the U.S. government in its history to use the threat of violence to restrict religious unorthodoxy among its citizens. And it could have been the most tragic if not for the timely intervention of Kane. Fearing a bloody clash, Kane persuaded a reluctant Buchanan to allow him to try, though only in an unofficial capacity, to mediate the conflict. Traveling incognito, Kane avoided the overland snows by sailing in January 1858 from New York City to Panama and then to California, before continuing on to Utah. In Salt Lake City, he advocated a peaceful solution to Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders before continuing to the army camp. Once there, Kane’s intervention aroused the animosity of the military officers. One captain wrote home: “My men want to hang him. Say he is a Mormon.” But a small faction of civilian leaders, led by newly appointed Utah governor Alfred Cumming, saw Kane’s mission quite differently. Kane persuaded Cumming to travel without the army to Salt Lake City, where Kane brokered a peace between Young and Cumming, and by extension between the Mormons and the nation. Returning home, Kane was hailed as a “Napoleon of Peace” and commended by a now grateful Buchanan. The New York Tribune exclaimed, “Honor to the patriot and the peacemaker!”² Three years later, the peacemaker had become an officer in the Union Army. Though he had worked for a peaceful solution to the sectional conflict before the war, he threw his energies into the northern war effort immediately after the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861. During the next two years, he raised one of the most storied regiments of the Union Army (the Pennsylvania Bucktails), gained a reputation for personal courage (or recklessness), was seriously wounded in two battles, and was briefly taken as a prisoner of war. In May 1863, Kane took a leave of absence from his Civil War command to recover his health, threatened by long-standing ailments and combat wounds, in the Allegheny Mountains of northwestern Pennsylvania. A month later, word arrived that Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had invaded Pennsylvania. His health still fragile, Kane left his sickbed and raced down from the mountains. Traveling in disguise, he slipped through Confederate lines and rejoined his brigade at Gettysburg on July 1, following the first day of fighting. Under his leadership, Kane’s soldiers played a key role in the intense fighting at Culp’s Hill, one of the crucial turning points of the war’s central battle, in which the Union lines held off a ferocious seven-hour assault by Confederate forces. Kane vaulted into the national consciousness as a result of his paradoxical

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pursuits of peace and war. Indeed, he was a man of sharp contrasts. An antislavery crusader, he longed for the chivalrous world of the southern gentry. A Philadelphian, a cosmopolitan urbanite, comfortable in the salons of Paris and the parlors of London, he spent most of the last twenty-five years of his life in the rustic Alleghenies, developing an eastern frontier. A master of media “spin,” Kane generally preferred backroom negotiations to the public spotlight. Equally repulsed and fascinated by politics, he decried the corruptness of the American political scene but was constantly drawn toward it. A child of wealth, an American aristocrat, he worried endlessly about finances. Raised in a devout Presbyterian home, Kane gravitated toward atheism and a “religion of humanity” (influenced by the French philosopher Auguste Comte) before experiencing not one, but two, conversions to Christianity, though he refused to join a denomination and the nature of his faith always remained ambiguous. Drawn to religious asceticism and self-denial, Kane was also deeply ambitious. A Jacksonian Democrat by birth, he betrayed his family and their true “faith,” first by becoming a Free Soiler, and then, even worse in their eyes, a Republican.³ Kane could speak in moving terms of the humanity of blacks and Native Americans and simultaneously shudder in horror at the prospects of racial mixing. Diminutive (he stood five feet four inches tall and was exceptionally slight) and described by contemporaries as feminine-looking, Kane overcompensated with aggressive masculinity. In perpetually feeble health and often depressed, he felt most alive when in danger. Some of these contrasts, of course, are contradictions only to a twenty-firstcentury mind. Others are more intriguing and difficult to explain. Certainly, not all of the tensions of Kane’s life are explicable or resolvable; internal inconsistency is part of the human condition. But some of the enigma of Kane’s character can be illuminated by reimmersing him in the cultural contexts of nineteenth-century America, which sheds light not only on Kane’s own life, but more importantly, on the culture around him. Kane’s life illuminates a type of social reformer central to America’s reform traditions but largely forgotten by its historians. Few topics in American history have attracted as much attention as the social reform movements in the decades preceding the Civil War. The roots of antebellum reform are generally found in the convergence of Whig politics and evangelical religion during the era of the Second Great Awakening. Evangelical Protestants became the religious and cultural mainstream of American life in these decades. They emphasized a personal conversion to Christ as the central experience of Christianity, the Bible as the sole religious authority, and the duty of Christians to engage actively in society through both revivalism and social reform. Most Baptists, Methodists,

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and Disciples of Christ, groups that were rapidly growing, were evangelicals, as were large numbers of Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Evangelical reformers constructed a “Benevolent Empire” of reforming institutions to perfect individuals and create a Christianized nation and culture. Concentrated in New England and Yankee regions of the Old Northwest, these reformers were generally middle-class Whig businessmen, farmers, and their wives. By contrast, Kane is representative of reformers who combined an allegiance to the Democratic Party, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism. The antebellum Democratic Party, though usually depicted as antireform because of its general support of southern slavery, had a significant reform wing, driven by the party’s egalitarian impulses and more inclusive vision of American religious and ethnic pluralism. Though generally raised in religious homes, many of these reformers, like Kane, abandoned traditional Christianity, channeling their high ideals into fervor for social reform. They thus joined an American tradition of reformers, including figures from Benjamin Franklin to William Lloyd Garrison, whose reforming impulses took them far from their Calvinist roots. Furthermore, even the devout among them argued for a strict separation of church and state, denounced clerical meddling in politics, and explicitly positioned themselves against evangelical, Whiggish reformers. The ethos of these anti-evangelical, Democratic reformers also resonated with romanticism. The emphasis that Jacksonian Democrats placed on liberty, by which they meant removing barriers to individual progress and freedom, corresponded with romanticism’s emphasis on the individual and its belief in the perfectibility of humankind. Romantics often distrusted traditional religion, though they generally retained a religious sensibility and longed for spirituality. A romantic impulse impelled these reformers to sympathize with those on the margins of society, declare war on human suffering, and create a self-identity rooted in protecting the oppressed—including slaves, prisoners, the poor, Catholic immigrants, and Mormons. An obituary of Kane aptly described this philosophy as “liberty to the down-trodden.”⁴ Antislavery and other nineteenth-century reforms owe as much, if not more, to these Democratic, anti-evangelical, romantic reformers as to their Whig, evangelical counterparts. Reformers like Kane insisted that they, not the evangelicals, represented the true spirit of American reform. Kane’s status as a foot soldier in a wide variety of causes makes him an ideal window onto this culture of reformers. Like other reformers of the day, Kane saw himself as part of a transatlantic movement. In the early 1840s, two extensive trips to Europe fired his reforming ideals and fueled his religious unorthodoxy. As a young man, Kane was a peripatetic reformer, a moral gadfly who flitted from one unpopular cause to the

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next, including abolition of capital punishment, peace, support for European revolutionaries, women’s rights, and education for the poor. Following his marriage to his second cousin Elizabeth Wood in 1853, Kane became an advocate of women’s medical education, and Elizabeth enrolled in the first medical school designed for women. In his reforms, Kane turned instinctively to writing and publishing; his actions are a case study in the convergence of politics, reform, and print culture. Like Kane, most reformers viewed newspapers and pamphlets as primary vehicles to promote their unpopular causes. He was particularly savvy at using the press, staging events, and creating images to promote sympathy for various oppressed groups. Kane’s life also reveals the political travails and trajectory of the reform wing of the Democratic Party. His father, John K. Kane, moved in the highest circles of the national Democratic Party, and Thomas absorbed Jacksonian ideology as a youth. As proslavery positions hardened in the Democratic Party, Kane, like many reform Democrats, found a temporary haven in the Free Soil movement of the late 1840s and early 1850s, becoming a leader in the effort to restrict slavery from the territories acquired in the Mexican-American War. A legal clerk in his father’s federal courtroom, Kane objected to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which required northerners, particularly federal judicial officers, to assist in the extradition of escaped slaves to the South. His protests even prompted his father to briefly imprison him on charges of contempt of court. As the Free Soil movement fizzled, Kane returned to the Democratic Party, even as many of his co-travelers continued on to join the infant Republican Party. During the first year of the Civil War, Kane himself became a Republican, and these former Democratic reformers remained a distinct force within the Republican Party. In 1872, Kane joined with many of his former companions in Democratic reform to protest the direction of the Republican Party by joining the Liberal Republican coalition. Although he returned to the mainstream Republican Party, his life illustrates the political path of many like-minded reformers. After the Civil War, Kane experienced a transition in his thought, which pointed toward the reform ethos of the Progressive Era, with its trust in social science, experts, and government solutions. Though always suspicious of centralized power, a legacy from the Jacksonians, Kane became the first president of the Pennsylvania Board of State Charities in 1869, a government committee that served as the foundation of contemporary state welfare agencies. Following his religious conversions, Kane also moved toward a partial rapprochement with evangelical reformers. From the late-1850s until his death in 1883, Kane developed a community in the Alleghenies of northwestern Pennsylvania (named Kane), which he sought to make a model temperance town.

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Nevertheless, Kane’s four decades of involvement with the Latter-day Saints demonstrate his enduring commitment to an anti-evangelical ethos, the tradition of religious pluralism of the antebellum Democratic Party, and romanticism. Evangelical reformers were at the forefront of the anti-Mormon political and cultural crusade that lasted most of the nineteenth century. They sought to reform individuals by freeing them from the clutches of Mormonism and to protect American culture from the threats posed by theocracy and polygamy. Kane dedicated his reform energies to preserving the religious liberty of the Latter-day Saints from the evangelical reformers. Kane first encountered the Mormons in 1846 when they had been recently forced from Illinois. A summer in the Mormon refugee camps in Iowa that year convinced Kane of the Mormons’ sincerity and spurred his decision to be their self-appointed advocate to the nation. After he returned from the camps, he embarked on a wide-ranging publicity campaign to transform the image of the Latter-day Saints in the American mind. Most Americans placed Mormons within a narrative of fraud and fanaticism, a dangerous threat to religion and republicanism. Kane’s counternarrative, which depicted the Saints as a persecuted minority driven from their homes in search of religious liberty, tapped into deeply held ideals of religious tolerance. It also resonated with changing ideas about the nature of pain, as Kane’s contemporaries increasingly saw suffering as deplorable and even eradicable whereas earlier generations had viewed pain as perhaps redemptive and definitely unavoidable.⁵ His efforts, conducted through the popular press and a widely read 1850 pamphlet, captured the nation’s attention and made sympathizing with the suffering Saints fashionable. But his campaign to transform the Mormons’ image abruptly stalled with the Saints’ acknowledgment in 1852 of their practice of polygamy, or plural marriage. Even so, Kane continued as the Saints’ principal political adviser until his death, forming a particularly close bond with Brigham Young and exerting enormous influence on nineteenth-century Mormon history. During the 1870s and early 1880s, Kane defended the Saints against a renewed national campaign targeting Mormon plural marriage and theocratic ambitions. He helped defeat or modify federal legislation that he viewed as impinging on the Mormons’ freedom of religion (even when they used that freedom for practices he personally opposed, such as polygamy). Furthermore, he contributed to Mormons’ communitarian experiments, educational programs, and settlements in Mexico. Kane’s own religious unorthodoxy enabled his commitment to radical reform and minority religions. Rejecting the evangelical orthodoxy of his youth, Kane, while a young man, cobbled together a spiritual life from eclectic sources, in-

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cluding Comte’s “Religion of Humanity,” the Catholic ascetic tradition, and nature. His religious quest led him to define himself against the prevailing evangelicalism of his family and culture. Throughout his life, he remained highly suspicious of organized religion, particularly evangelical denominations, despite his two midlife conversions. Like Kane, other dissenters from the evangelical mainstream came to the defense of the Mormons, in part because of their own hostility toward evangelicalism. These dynamics—a reformer’s own religious ambivalence, commitment to religious liberty, and opposition to evangelical reform—help explain why some radical reformers took up the cause of marginalized religious groups. Kane’s life also illuminates the influences on nineteenth-century reform of two major cultural types: the gentleman of honor and the romantic hero. Historians usually associate the culture of honor, which emphasized a gentleman’s public reputation and gave him recourse to the duel to defend it, with the South. According to these historians, the culture of honor had withered away in the North by Kane’s lifetime, the victim of the spread of evangelicalism and the integration of northerners into a market economy. In the borderlands between the North and South and among elite northerners like Kane, however, the ethic of honor remained powerful and helped define the contours and boundaries of the anti-evangelical reform community. Ideals of honor and chivalry particularly shaped Kane’s Civil War career. During the war, he envisioned himself as a medieval knight who fought courageously and chivalrously, who denounced self-promoting officers as serving for personal ambition rather than for love of country, who viewed his opponents on the battlefield as preferable to dissenters at home, and who treated his opponents magnanimously. Kane also applied the ethos of honor to the field of reform. For Kane, a man of honor—particularly one born to privilege, like him—defended those lower on the social scale. Kane’s view of himself as a man of honor, a chivalrous defender of the downtrodden, closely relates to another cultural type, the romantic hero. Nineteenthcentury literature and culture teemed with depictions of the hero, a result of the transatlantic flowering of romanticism. Though heroes in romantic literature and the cultural imagination came in a variety of guises, including such prototypes as Napoleon and the English poet Lord Byron and his literary characters, they shared certain qualities that Kane highly valued. The romantic hero was an iconoclast who exalted individuality and displayed unusual sensitivity to social injustices. Like Kane, many of the cultural and literary romantic heroes came from aristocratic backgrounds and rebelled against their class and station in life. Kane prided himself on standing against the crowd for righteous causes, on acting decisively and trusting his own conclusions rather than cultural norms, and

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on undertaking arduous and dangerous missions (such as during the Utah War and the Civil War) in defiance of his physical frailties. Harper’s Weekly recognized Kane’s attempts to emulate the pattern of the romantic hero as it eulogized his “delightful independence and freedom from conventional timidity, which recalled earlier and remoter figures of the heroic type.”⁶ Though little known today, Kane has not been altogether ignored. The most important non-Mormon in Mormon history, he is generally remembered only in connection with the Latter-day Saints and has a place both in scholarship on Mormonism and in Mormon cultural memory. Nineteenth-century Mormon leaders promised Kane that his name would always be held “in honorable remembrance” among the Saints. His statue stands today at the Utah State Capitol, a reflection of the Saints’ enduring gratitude. Nevertheless, Kane’s story, in both historians’ accounts and Mormon memory, is incomplete and often inaccurate, lacking the context of Kane’s other activities and the broader world of reform culture.⁷ Newly available sources make it possible to narrate fully Kane’s life in the world of nineteenth-century reform. Indeed, Kane is particularly well-situated to serve as a window onto reform culture because of the rich sources he left behind. After more than a century in the hands of his descendants, the bulk of Kane’s private papers—including thousands of letters, manuscripts of published and unpublished writings, legal and business records, and his wife Elizabeth’s extensive journals—became available to researchers in 2000 at Brigham Young University. Additional collections of Kane documents are housed at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Yale, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These archival records allow a deep investigation into the culture of reform Kane inhabited. In the following narrative, Kane’s involvement in reform will take center stage. Other aspects of his life—for example, his promotion of his brother Elisha’s Arctic adventures and his building of his community in the Alleghenies—will be less emphasized, though not ignored. At critical junctures in nineteenth-century America, most visibly during the Utah War and the Civil War, Kane’s actions changed history. Just as crucially, his life illuminates a world of mid-nineteenth-century reform shaped by romanticism, anti-evangelicalism, and the ideology of the Democratic Party.

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Raising Kane

Reflecting on his early life at the age of twenty-eight, Thomas Kane stated, “I have been born with the gold spoon in my mouth, to station and influence and responsibility, here,” referring to Philadelphia, “and it is here that God means me to administer to these and be holden to account for my stewardship.” From his prominent upper-class family, Kane inherited wealth, connections, ambition, noblesse oblige, and an attachment to Philadelphia. Though recently eclipsed as the nation’s largest city and commercial center by New York City, the Philadelphia of Kane’s youth still retained its role as an international hub of trade and had begun its transition from a leading seaport to a center of industry. In addition to being attuned to the transatlantic world, elite Philadelphians like the Kanes had a southern orientation. Given the city’s central location between North and South, most upper-class Philadelphians had connections with the South through business arrangements, kinship ties, and political alliances. Kane’s childhood in Philadelphia and the influence of his tight-knit family, particularly his powerful father John and his dynamic older brother Elisha, cast a long shadow on his life and guided his future reform enthusiasm and trajectory.¹ Thomas’s father, John Kintzing Kane, exerted an enormous (at times overbearing) influence over him. John’s paternal grandfather and namesake, John Kane, immigrated to America from Ireland after his conversion from Catholicism to Anglicanism and married Sybil Kent, daughter of a prominent evangelical preacher. Loyalists during the American Revolution, John and Sybil lost their substantial property and fled to Nova Scotia. Following the Revolution, seven of John’s sons, including Thomas Kane’s grandfather Elisha, returned to America and established a mercantile firm, Kane and Brothers, which shipped

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Raising Kane

FIGURE 1. Jane Duval Leiper Kane in her ball gown painted by the portraitist Thomas Sully in 1824. (MSS 792, Thomas L. Kane and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.)

goods between the American frontier, New York City, and Europe. Elisha’s first wife, Alida Van Rensselaer, came from a distinguished New York patroon family. Their first child, John, was born in Albany in 1795; Alida died four years later following the birth of a daughter. After her death, Elisha took his young family to Philadelphia, where he married Elizabeth Kintzing, established a local branch of Kane and Brothers, and rose to some prominence as a merchant. John became close to his stepmother and took Kintzing as his middle name. Educated at Yale, he subsequently studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1817.²

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FIGURE 2. Thomas Sully’s portrait of John Kintzing Kane in 1824. (MSS 792, Thomas L. Kane and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.)

Two years later, the young lawyer married Jane Duval Leiper, whom he had courted since the age of seventeen. The marriage was not only a love match— John called Jane “the light to my world of dreams”—but was also politically savvy, as it gave John an entrée into high-level politics. Jane’s father, Thomas Leiper, a native of Scotland, had compiled a distinguished record in both business and politics; he fought in the Revolution, maintained a friendship with Thomas Jefferson, and served as president of the Philadelphia Common Council on three occasions. Leiper’s own marriage to Elizabeth Gray, daughter of a Quaker revolutionary who had served as the speaker of the Pennsylvania Assem-

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Raising Kane

bly, had solidified his social status. An entrepreneur, Leiper processed, distributed, and sold tobacco; operated a stone quarry; and built the first commercial railroad in the United States.³ Jane had other endearing qualities besides a politically connected family. Reputed to be “one of the most beautiful women of her day,” she and John were chosen to open a ball given in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette in Philadelphia in 1824 during Lafayette’s triumphal American tour. Inspired, the Philadelphia portraitist Thomas Sully painted Jane in her gown. The Kanes had seven children. Elisha Kent arrived first in February 1820. Thomas Leiper, named for his maternal grandfather, came two years later, on January 27, 1822. Like Elisha, he was baptized a Presbyterian. Next came John, who died in infancy, followed by Robert Patterson (Pat) in 1827, the only daughter Elizabeth (Bessie) in 1830, John Jr. in 1833, and William in 1838. (See the Kane family chart in the appendix.) Musically talented, Jane imparted a love of music to her children (Thomas sang and played the piano). Her children also inherited some of her personality traits. Her son-in-law Charles W. Shields described her as “distinguished for the energy, nerve, elasticity, and warmheartedness which became famous in her son.” Though Shields referred to the firstborn Elisha, the same held true for Thomas.⁴ After his marriage, John quickly entered the political world, using Leiper and Kane connections to pave the way. During a visit to Washington, D.C., in 1823, he reported that his uncle Elias Kane “ranks here among the first; and for his sake and to win his influence . . . the leading men of all parties have lavished their civilities on me.” His social calendar had been so full—including meetings with Martin Van Buren, John C. Calhoun, and John Quincy Adams—that he had “refused invitations from Mr. [Daniel] Webster for dinner & Mrs. Adams for tea.” The following year, John was elected to the Pennsylvania legislature as a Federalist. As a legislator, John wrote anonymous political reports for newspapers, beginning a pattern of anonymous writing that marked his own political career and his son’s reform efforts. To Jane, he portrayed himself as stubbornly standing on principle in the face of political pressure and public disapproval, a self-image he bequeathed to Thomas. His “conscientious & straight forward” actions had “thwarted many private interests,” causing him to “have been traduced most abominably in Philadelphia.” Nevertheless, John concluded, “I never asked for popular approbation till I had secured that of my own conscience.”⁵ John left the waning Federalist Party even before the end of his legislative term, repulsed by the “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay following the disputed presidential election of 1824, which supporters of Andrew Jackson believed robbed him of the presidency in favor of Adams.

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In 1828, John worked extensively for Jackson’s presidential campaign. He later wrote, “I was in it up to the armpits. I called meetings, collected money, got up transparencies, engaged election houses, conducted correspondence, and wrote pamphlets.” His pamphlet Candid View of the Presidential Question contrasted the self-made man and national hero Jackson with the elitist Adams. Distributed nationally, Candid View helped create a new type of campaigning through the popular press and pamphleteering.⁶ After the 1828 election, which saw Democrats led by Jackson triumphant both nationally and in Philadelphia, Kane accepted a post as city solicitor and began to move in leading Democratic circles. Nevertheless, he expressed ambivalence about elected or appointed office (an attitude his son inherited), a standard stance during this era when political ideology was still deeply antiparty though parties were coming to dominate actual politics. In 1831, John lamented the “hatred, sad flattery, and backbiting, and lies,—the whole atmosphere of Washington.” “And yet,” he added, “there is excellent and agreeable society in Washington.” Kane greatly admired Jackson, “the immeasurable superior of all the men I have ever seen.” In turn, Kane impressed Jackson with his ability and loyalty. Indeed, he claimed to be the “writer of the first newspaper article” that attacked the National Bank following Jackson’s declaration of war on the bank as a symbol of monopoly and tyranny. Kane’s antibank stance earned him opprobrium in Philadelphia, a center of anti-Jackson sentiment and the home of the bank, but won him gratitude from Jackson, who made opposition to the bank central to Democratic orthodoxy.⁷ In 1832, Jackson tapped Kane to be one of three commissioners to decide on claims as established in an 1831 treaty in which France agreed to repay attacks on American neutral shipping during the Napoleonic era. Bickering between France and the United States over the payment became one of the central foreign policy events of the Jackson presidency and elevated the role of the commissioners. John’s work on the commission lasted until 1836, and his time in Washington deepened his political contacts and made him a nationally known Democratic insider. He gradually entered into Jackson’s trust, and his letters indicate frequent meetings, both social and political, at the White House. Indeed, it was rumored that John ghostwrote some of Jackson’s presidential messages. His close relationship with his cousin Elias Kane, a respected Democratic senator from Illinois until his untimely death in 1835, also introduced John into the “best social circles in the country.” The visitors to Elias’s Washington home (besides John) included Vice President Martin Van Buren, “the elite of Congress and the Departments,” and prominent literary figures.⁸ Although John occasionally took public leadership roles, he preferred to exert

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his influence as one of the “men behind the curtain, that taught the wires how to move,” a trait Thomas shared. In a biographical sketch, Thomas proudly described his father as “a writer of other men’s speeches—a prompter of the stock performers on the stage, who could find his sufficient reward and enjoyment in seeing the drama enacted of which he might have claimed to be the author.” John controlled the action from offstage particularly through anonymous writings. According to Thomas, John edited “several popular works in law, medicine, and divinity” on behalf of “unlettered friends,” as well as authored “numerous reports of engineers and legislative bodies.” John himself said he had “written in my day on all sorts of subjects, and in almost every assignable degree of ignorance,” including everything from a “Piano Instructor” to an “Archer’s Manual.” His political pamphlets circulated “by the ten thousand,” and he twice served as a part-time newspaper editor.⁹ John in many respects represented the nouveau riche among Philadelphia’s more established elite, but his ability and gentlemanly manner, noted by even his political enemies, won him entrance to the city’s most exclusive scientific, literary, and cultural circles. Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher, who thought Kane “unscrupulous in defending doctrines that tended to gratify his ambition,” nevertheless found him “genial & gracious in his manners,” with the “accomplishments, feelings and habits of a gentleman.” The recipient of a substantial inheritance, John exuded noblesse oblige, cultivated an aristocratic aura, and furnished his home luxuriously. (The Kanes lived in central Philadelphia and, after 1848, also had a summer home north of the city.) An amateur scientist, John became a longtime leader of the American Philosophical Society, one of the country’s leading scientific institutions. He also served in leadership positions in the Academy of Fine Arts, Musical Fund Society, Institute for the Instruction of the Blind, Girard College, and the Law Academy of Philadelphia.¹⁰ Although Kane’s philanthropic involvement would seem to make him a likely participant in evangelical social reform, his religious and cultural outlooks were generally at odds with evangelical reformers. His childhood gave him an ecumenical streak that later influenced his son. Among his ancestors, Thomas could count Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Catholics, Dutch Reformed, Quakers, Anglicans, and Moravians. Though raised a Presbyterian, John often went to Quaker and Baptist services as a youth and also attended a Catholic school. John and Jane became devout Presbyterians, and John served as a prominent lay leader at Philadelphia’s elite Second Presbyterian. The Kanes strove to raise their family in a pious Protestant environment. Thomas later remembered “when Mother heard catechism and read good books all the long Sabbath day.”

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As a delegate to the Presbyterian General Assembly, John supported the Old School faction in the 1837–38 denominational split. Although Old School Presbyterians joined with their more evangelical brethren in some reform efforts, they were suspicious of the evangelical reform mentality. New School Presbyterians, by contrast, figured prominently in antebellum evangelical reform. John’s support of the Democratic Party and his involvement in Freemasonry (Thomas noted he was a “mason of eminence” and followed his father into Masonry) further separated him from the Whigs and Anti-Masons who made up the evangelical reform community.¹¹ In addition, John strongly defended “unqualified freedom of thought on all subjects whatever, Religion, Politics, or Science,” a position that Thomas also espoused (though John would sometimes lament where Thomas’s thoughts led him). In an 1841 lecture to Philadelphia’s Mercantile Library Company, John decried the “intolerance of opinion” that often prevailed in the city. “There is not, there cannot be,” John sighed, “a despotism more detestable” than the “unwritten code” of public opinion, which “teaches to substitute authority for argument.” Progress occurred only when “some have ventured to think for themselves, holding dogmas in small respect, and spurning what they deemed error however venerable or dignified.” John’s advocacy of tolerance for religious and cultural pluralism reflected the beliefs of the Democratic Party. In addition, his celebration of the few willing to stand against the crowd illustrated the spirit of romanticism that also shaped Thomas’s life.¹² John’s letters home from Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., suggest a devoted (if frequently absent) father, ambitious for his sons’ futures. In 1825, he wrote to Jane, “say pretty things to the children for me, tell Elisha I love him for being good, & Tom that I have sent him a kiss, & the little pet must learn to say papa.” Expressing a sentiment typical of his time, John often felt torn about his pursuit of public life and his absences from home. “Am I doomed to seek the means of life and the bauble reputation, by sacrificing that which gives life its charm and fame its value?” he asked in 1833. He fretted that he purchased his success “overdearly” and wrote longingly to Jane of the “kind welcome of Walnut Street, the clustering of my children round my neck, and the fond warm pressure of my heart to yours.”¹³ The pressures of John’s time away took their toll on Jane. In 1833, John wrote her from Washington: “What a frightful picture you have drawn me of Home! All is confusion, every body wrong, nothing, nobody as it should be.” Tell his sons, John joked, that he would return with “lots of hard words and sour faces”: “So, look out there, you Pat & Tom & Elisha:—I’m a-comin, as Davy Crocket says.” More seriously, he reassured her that Elisha and Thomas, while rambunc-

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tious boys, had “excellent points of character,” as well as “all the elements of gallantry.” In 1835, John further told Jane, “More noble minded, pure-hearted boys, there are not in the world.” Certainly, they had faults, but John blamed these on their education. Elisha’s “first schools were bad ones,” which “either broke down his spirit or suffered him to run wild.” Thomas “was better trained at first,” but John expressed dissatisfaction with the boys’ current school, which “is not well organized, or else not well conducted.” John also thought that he and Jane had tried “to teach our boys too much.” He suggested their sons discontinue their music and drawing lessons (though he valued these subjects) and focus on reading, writing, math, and history. “Don’t be disheartened about our boys,” John concluded, “they are excellent children, and will make us happy, I doubt not.”¹⁴ Jane probably had good reason to complain of her sons’ behavior. Elisha’s first biographer, William Elder, a friend of the Kane family, depicted Elisha as a precocious, impulsive, and “absolutely fearless” boy, with Thomas as his dutiful companion in troublemaking. “To arbitrary authority,” Elisha “was a regular little rebel” and “had a pair of little fists that worked with the steam-power of passion in the administration of distributive justice.” At the age of nine, Elisha tried to save Thomas from an unjustified whipping at school. The schoolmaster whipped Elisha as well for his impertinence; “the sense of injustice changed his mood to defiance” and he “quickly converted the discipline into a fracas.” At the age of ten, Elisha “studied the weather, watched the moon, and carefully scanned the opportunities afforded by the nights for scaling fences, clambering over out-houses, and getting into the tree-tops” and trained Thomas “for similar achievements.” One night, the brothers snuck out of bed to scale the roof of their three-story house and climb to the top of the chimney.¹⁵ Given their closeness in age and shared adventures, Elisha and Thomas became tight youthful confidantes. During their lives, Elisha would always overshadow his younger brother and become a widely recognized national hero. In 1850, Thomas described Elisha as one who “spends his life doing the fine brave things that ladies love and men envy.” When Elisha visited relatives in Virginia in 1829, seven-year-old Thomas wrote, “I hope you are well I think of you very often and wish the time were come when we would come back again.” Both Elisha and Thomas were small (in 1828, at ages eight and six, they weighed thirty-three and thirty-four pounds, respectively, and Thomas weighed seventy pounds at age eighteen) and suffered from sickly dispositions. Rheumatic fever struck Elisha as a teenager; complications led to endocarditis (inflammation of the heart’s valves and lining), and relapses of both plagued him throughout his life. Thomas’s recurrent health problems possibly derived, at least in part, from pulmonary tuberculosis. In addition, Thomas frequently complained of neural-

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gia, a somewhat vague condition that generally referred to intense pain in the facial nerves, debilitating headaches, and sometimes sensitivity to light, cold, and heat. He also suffered from a gastrointestinal problem; as he told Elisha, “my enjoyment depends pretty much on the tone of my stomach.” Both brothers often suspected they lay at the edge of death, and while they suffered intensely from real illnesses, they also had a tendency to fear the worst. As William Elder, a physician, put it, Elisha’s “ailments had always in them a preponderant character of neuropathic disturbance,” a statement true of Thomas as well. Their illnesses and hypochondriac tendencies occasionally pushed both into a spiral of depression.¹⁶ The Kanes’ education consisted of a mixture of boarding schools, local schools, and private tutors. In 1828, Elisha and Thomas, then just eight and six, were enrolled at the East Whiteland Academy in nearby Chester County. The following year, Thomas reported, “I go to school every day but have nothing to do yet with Latin but I study my other lessons every night.” The Kane brothers often passed youthful summers with relatives in Virginia, where tutors instructed them. John also likely hired a priest to tutor Elisha and Thomas in Latin, a result of his own positive experience in a Catholic school. Thomas early revealed a talent for writing, which John urged him to cultivate. After reading a youthful essay on “The History of the Roman Republic,” one of Thomas’s instructors praised its style as “remarkably easy & beautiful” and predicted that, “with care,” the author “will make a first-rate writer.” In addition, natural science attracted both Thomas and Elisha. Besides exploding “sundry bottles of chemicals in the outhouse,” they collected “quite a good cabinet of minerals, which the two had arranged in scientific order.”¹⁷ Thomas enrolled for his only semester of college in January 1839. Apparently concerned for his health, his parents chose Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania (about 120 miles west of Philadelphia); by contrast, Elisha went to the University of Virginia and Pat to Yale. Founded in 1783, Dickinson had quickly attained a level of prominence in American educational life. Following a period of financial problems and internal wrangling in the 1810s and 1820s, Dickinson came under Methodist control in 1833, with John Price Durbin, former chaplain of the Senate, assuming the presidency. Methodists like Durbin were eager to build educational institutions in part to counter the widespread image of Methodists as lower-class and ungenteel. Though led by Methodists, Dickinson welcomed students of any denomination, only requiring them to attend college chapel and Sunday meetings at the church of their choice. Pedagogically, Durbin hoped to foster learning “by regular and careful recitation, accompanied with free and unrestrained enquiry and conversation.”¹⁸

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FIGURE 3. John Kane with his two oldest sons, Elisha (left) and Thomas (center). (Reproduced by permission from the American Philosophical Society.)

On parting with his son, John offered Thomas a list of fatherly advice, which he encouraged him to read weekly. John instructed his son to engage in daily “devotional exercises,” to be “uniformly respectful to your teachers,” to obey the college regulations, and to inform on his classmates if necessary. Furthermore, Thomas should seek out “refined society, especially that of ladies,” and be “assiduous in your studies, moderate in your meals, regular in your exercise, neat in your dress.” Elisha visited soon after Thomas’s arrival and reported to their par-

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ents that Thomas’s “ambition” was “overtaking [his] strength” and threatening his health. As a result, John emphasized “that college honours are in themselves very paltry objects of effort . . . I would grudge the earning of the best honour of your class if it were to cost you a fraction of constitutional vigour.” He admonished Thomas to exercise regularly, particularly through horseback riding, to avoid becoming an “invalid.”¹⁹ Thomas quickly distinguished himself academically. His first “monthly report” gave him “very good” marks for both academics and behavior. By April, his parents congratulated him on his high class rank and encouraged him to cultivate a relationship with his mentor, Merritt C. Caldwell, the college’s most eminent professor. A devout, youthful, and sickly Methodist, Caldwell agitated for temperance and other evangelical reform causes.²⁰ A freshman “rebellion” marked Thomas’s final weeks in college and gives some insights into his developing character. Student pranks and rebellions occurred frequently at most American colleges, including Dickinson. One disgruntled student, posing as President Durbin, had even penned Caldwell’s obituary, which the unsuspecting Christian Advocate and Journal had published. Caldwell was still very much alive and Durbin not even a little amused. Other student disturbances were of the more predictable sort: intoxication, noise in the dormitories, petty squabbles. In this incident, twelve freshmen (including Thomas’s cousin John Leiper) had left the town on an excursion without permission; learning of their absence, Caldwell abruptly called for a recitation at eight in the morning. Upon their return, the twelve freshmen chose two messengers to explain their absence; for their efforts, the two students were dismissed from school. Eighteen freshmen, including Thomas and probably the entire freshmen class, petitioned the faculty on behalf of the dismissed students, arguing that they were “submissive to authority—respectful to their instructors—advancing well in their studies.”²¹ When this failed, the ten remaining students who had been absent sent another petition, refusing “to attend recitation” until the other two students were readmitted. Unconvinced, the faculty met with the students individually and informed them they would also be suspended if they persisted. Leiper and eight others refused to sign an apology and were promptly sent home. A large group of students, mostly upperclassmen but including Kane, subsequently appealed the dismissal of the freshmen, arguing that the suspensions arose over a trivial matter and urging mercy, but to no avail. For Durbin, the dispute was one of a “pure question of authority” and the students would be readmitted if they would “retract the ground taken, and return to their duties as students.”²² During the confrontation, Thomas tried to negotiate a stance that would

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please both sides. While Thomas’s letters home have not survived, his parents’ letters suggest that he may have possibly informed on the students, suggesting his respect for authority and his willingness to be unpopular with the other students, but he also reached out to his classmates by signing petitions on their behalf. Jane congratulated Thomas on his “moral courage” for opposing his classmates (“the thoughtless mass”) and persevering “in an honourable course.” John thought Thomas had “done exactly and gallantly right.” His parents advised him to waive his class rank, which would both preserve the faculty’s respect and give Thomas a “reputation for sensitive honour” by demonstrating that he “had other motives” in opposing his classmates “besides the wish to gain advantage over your competitors.” Not yet a rebel against social and political norms, Thomas appeared eager to please school officials and his parents.²³ Even before the rebellion, Thomas was considering leaving Dickinson, a result of his parents’ continued concern for his physical health and his “blue devils” (depression). Soon afterwards, he left and never returned to college. Plans to improve his health dominated Thomas’s actions upon his return home. A cousin wrote: “Tom, it is thought, will try the effect of a trip to Canton. He needs some total change of habits to effect a change in his constitution.” While he never left for Canton, Thomas visited the West Indies at some point in 1839 or 1840.²⁴ Thomas’s childhood gave him not only political connections, an upper-class education, and a genteel background, but also a commitment to the Democratic Party, an appreciation for religious diversity, and a romantic respect for those who stood against the crowd. At age eighteen, to recover his health, Thomas embarked on an even more extensive journey, which proved crucial to his future as a reformer.

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Between 1840 and 1844, as Kane entered adulthood, his parents sent him on two extended trips to Europe. Exposure to European culture widened his horizons; never again could he be completely comfortable in provincial Philadelphia. His visits transformed his religious views, as he left behind the orthodoxy of his childhood and began a long, peripatetic religious quest. For the next two decades, Kane was attracted, at various times, to atheism, a vague sense of God’s providence, the aesthetics and ritual power of Catholicism, a religious humanism inspired by Auguste Comte, and an antidenominational Christianity. This personal journey provided a crucial context for his involvement in the community of anti-evangelical reformers and his defense of religious minorities. Furthermore, the voyages introduced Kane to French philosophy, European cultural and social institutions, and the transatlantic world of social reform, which combined to vault him into reform causes upon his return. Kane left on his first European excursion in early 1840 to improve his health, a relatively common practice among elite nineteenth-century Americans. The voyage, his parents hoped, would give him the necessary health to pursue a career as a lawyer. John had high ambitions for all of his sons. Elisha, he wrote Thomas shortly after his departure, “is an ardent student, and promises to be eminent” as a doctor. Thomas “must look to the bar,” and Pat would “push his way for Yale.” Even with some recent financial setbacks, he promised, “There will be enough to educate you all, and it may be to give you a start besides.” So, he enjoined Thomas to spend liberally, as “it would pain me to think you had denied yourself a little luxury that a lubber can relish at sea.” As Thomas departed, John vacillated between declaring his freedom and inundating him with advice. He gave his son “carte blanche,” as he had no doubts of “your habits, your occu-

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pations, your pleasures.” Even so, John counseled Thomas to travel “respectably rather than ex[clu]sively,” “accept invitations of hospitality from proper people,” keep a travel diary, and write home often. A continual stream of letters flowed between Philadelphia and Thomas’s travels, filled with news of home, John’s advice, and Thomas’s descriptions of his voyage.¹ Thomas stopped first at New Orleans, and the city’s rough-and-tumble nature impressed him. He witnessed “one man killed & half a dozen wounded” in a fire, and in walks along the levee, he saw “one severe contusion of the head & mangled face and limbs, one escape from drowning, one case of ribs & breast bone broken, and knock downs &c. without number.” Reflecting his religious upbringing, Thomas criticized the lack of Sabbath observance. A New Orleans Sabbath “was the great day for lotteries . . . and people to get drunk and fight duels,” but Thomas scurried off to hear a sermon on the “infallibility of the Supreme Being.” He likewise assured his mother of his continued morality. “A Southern climate does not favour the growth of morality and even the Puritanic New Englanders change their habits with the air they breathe.” Thomas, however, played the part of the embattled evangelical and refused to participate in card playing and gambling, even though his decision brought a “hearty laugh at my expense.” While repelled (and perhaps intrigued) by the violence and irreligiosity, Thomas made no mention of slavery or the city’s famous slave markets, the target of much abolitionist propaganda.² Health concerns dominated Thomas’s travels. After a quick trip to Cuba from New Orleans, he frightened his parents by giving the impression he was “worn out and decrepit, fairly spirit broken, and pent up on a miserable cot among the cobwebs of a cockloft.” “Almost mad with alarm,” his parents pleaded for him to return and feared he was either “sick, penniless, and without a friend” or “floating in a semiliquid graveyard.” Thomas alternated between assuaging and heightening their fears. He worried that he would return with the same “dwarfish form I left you with” and be a “worthless object of pity.” While tempted by the idea of returning home, he resolved to continue on, and his parents acquiesced. Thomas promised that while he would keep them informed of his health, he would write less of “foul stomach, and ill humoured disposition.” Even so, he fatalistically added, he might not return. Resigned to Thomas’s decision, John sent a letter to meet him in Liverpool that urged him to remember two central points: “your primary object is health, & to this no expense should be spared: your secondary is to get home as soon as you can fairly hope to resume your education with vigour.” After arriving in London, Thomas admitted to his parents that health problems had fueled his “blue devils.” Throughout his life, Thomas’s physical health and emotional health were tightly linked, as health

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crises brought on recurrent bouts of depression. In despair, he wrote home, “I am unchanged, the identical ache & ailing, nervous, weak-backed, dyspeptious pigmy.” Laments about his health marked his entire time in Europe, perhaps the high point of his lifelong tendency toward hypochondria.³ In England, Thomas toured and met relatives, including the family of one of his father’s cousins, Harriet Kane Wood. Harriet’s husband William remembered Thomas as a “little fellow with a round-about jacket, and full of mannerism.” Thomas impressed the young Wood children, especially four-year-old Elizabeth (his future wife), whom he later remembered as a “little girl, a ruddy little thing with brown hair and English neck” with a “sweet smile of her own.” In the coming years, he showered the Wood children, who felt a “great affection for their Cousin Tom,” with gifts. In 1842, Elizabeth wrote him in large, uncertain handwriting, “My dear Cousin, I thank you for my pretty little Indian boy.”⁴ From London, Thomas traveled on to Paris, forming part of a steady stream of American visitors to France during this era. In 1830, a middle-class uprising had led to the creation of the constitutional July Monarchy, which governed France under King Louis-Philippe from 1830 to 1848. During this period, the number of American tourists to France increased from about two thousand a year to roughly three thousand. As one well-connected New Yorker expressed in 1835, “All the world (our world) is going to Europe.” Most American tourists were wealthy young men, and a Parisian visit fulfilled many functions for them. A few, like Kane, primarily sought health. In addition, a European voyage, although only a vestige of the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, endowed a traveler with cultural prestige, useful in either cementing one’s place in the upper class or, for parvenus, making such a claim. Others went for postgraduate study, particularly medical training. Notwithstanding its cultural amenities, Paris could prove shocking to the sensibilities of Americans, who often commented on the city’s grime, rampant poverty, lack of running water, and people urinating in the streets. Even so, the city had a reputation for a healthy climate.⁵ While in Paris, Thomas’s emotions oscillated between hope and despair. To Elisha, he expressed his fears: “I am growing more unhappy than ever and even begin to feel a most damned fear” of returning. In the next breath, he resolved not to allow his health to quell his ambition. If a career in law failed, he would emigrate to “Wisconsin and an honest life of good hard labour,” the first of many schemes in his life in which the West (real and imagined) played a central role.⁶ Thomas deeply imbibed the cultural offerings of Paris. To his parents, he wrote, “My painful business of seeing sights has been indefatigably pursued.” After more than a week at the Louvre, he reported he had not yet seen “more

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than half the collection.” He attended free public lectures at the Jardin des Plantes (botanical gardens), the Law School, the College of the Sorbonne, and the School of Medicine. In addition, Thomas associated with a “number of highly enlightened and truly Christian philanthropists, who made the welfare of the poor and unbefriended the constant study of their lives.” From these, he learned of a French educational movement to establish salles d’asiles, or nursery schools/kindergartens, and a decade later he drew on this experience to establish a school in Philadelphia. Besides his French contacts, Thomas hobnobbed with the upper crust of “Paris American society,” reveling in dinners with Ambassador Lewis Cass at Versailles and with the “refined intercourse of genteel ladies.” Indeed, his European travels convinced him of American superiority: “the more I see of other countries, the prouder am I of being an American.”⁷ Thomas also had brushes with French radicalism, which he masked in his letters home. His self-censorship of his involvement in radical politics in letters to his parents illustrates his growing sense of independence from them. After witnessing a strike cut short by a threatening rainstorm, he was decidedly unsympathetic to the strikers to his parents, wishing for a Napoleon who would “put down” the workers. To his brother Pat, however, he revealed that his status as a “batchelor who has neither name fortune nor family of his own” freed him to pursue “so many queer adventures.” Indeed, he was drawn to the French reputation for radical politics (which attracted political exiles from throughout Europe) as well as the city’s robust political atmosphere, which included a lively popular press, public debates, and all types of propaganda, almost universally hostile to Louis-Philippe’s government.⁸ According to a biographical sketch written by Thomas’s future wife Elizabeth, his letters of introduction gave him access to the “exclusive coteries of the old nobles,” including an “old Abbé” who in his youth had been a secretary to Robespierre. This abbé in turn introduced Thomas to the “revolutionary element which was always fermenting in Paris.” Elizabeth continued: “Into this Kane threw himself with his boyish fervor, awakening the attention of the police by his erratic appearances in such varying companionship. Much to his disgust, his apartments were visited and his papers seized on suspicion that he was an emissary of that shabby rogue, Louis Napoleon. Becoming satisfied of his innocence, the Chief of Police atoned by affording him many curious glimpses into the inner life of Paris.” While this tale has the tenor of a family legend, contemporaneous documents suggest some grounding in reality. Harriet Wood wrote Thomas in October 1840 of her amusement upon learning of “your papers having been searched, as you were thought a suspicious character.”⁹ The facts became embellished in later years and proved useful for the devel-

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oping perception, by himself and others, of Kane as a romantic hero. After the Civil War, Kane claimed that he had first received military experience “behind the barricades of Paris.” In 1867, the New York Semi-Weekly Tribune asserted that he “became acquainted with the Socialists” in Paris, “was a Red Republican of the deepest hue,” and “was engaged in the street-fights” during the French Revolution of 1848 that overthrew the July Monarchy. Obituaries of both Thomas and Elizabeth likewise indicated that he had been wounded during the 1848 revolution. Thomas never directly claimed involvement in the 1848 fighting, which would have been easy enough to disprove since he spent that year safely in Philadelphia; however, he apparently did not discourage the perception that he had been involved, perhaps because it fit into the image that he cultivated of himself as a romantic rebel. Just as the prototypical romantic hero Lord Byron famously fought for Greek independence, so Kane let it be known that he had manned the barricades for the republican cause in France.¹⁰ Kane’s stay in Europe also provoked him to contemplate religious questions. He initially found much to despise in European religion, both Catholic and Protestant. While in France, he issued a stinging (though conventional) critique of Catholicism: “How Glad I shall be to be once more in a Christian land! . . . I am sick of the Popish mummery which here passes for religion.” He wrote that French “infidels” had substituted the “idolatrous worship of disgusting relics and images of saints [and] Virgins . . . for the religion of our pure prophet Jesus of Nazareth.” Like innumerable Protestant critics, Kane claimed that Catholicism’s veneer of religiosity hid hypocrisy and evil. At the consecration of the archbishop of Paris, he saw “noble, venerable looking men” among the clergy but concluded that their outward gentility and clerical garb only cloaked their iniquity, which he imagined included sexual immorality and even murder. A few months later, after Kane was seriously injured, an American priest helped nurse him back to health. Kane chided his mother not to think of the well-educated and congenial priest as akin to “the bloody Jesuits whom our charitable Presbyterians hold up to our eyes.” Even so, Kane mocked the priest for believing in “all the ridiculous stories of monkish miracles” and for possessing a relic, a supposed “piece of the flesh of St. Vincent de Paul.” Cracks in his religious upbringing, however, were already present, for he recognized the irony: “I never laughed at what seemed his folly for I should not have liked him to retort upon me the wonder of ‘The Acts’ which we Presbyterians are taught to believe so implicitly.”¹¹ The Protestant English clergy were little better than the French priests. “Were I born an Englishman,” Kane wrote, “I should certainly enter the church.” He could thus “enjoy the pleasures of life” by hiring “some poor devil of a curate” to do the difficult work of the ministry, and “provided I did not keep too many

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mistresses at one time, or got drunk too often by the way-side, I should never lose my gown, but just draw my salary and live like a gentleman.” Kane’s attempts to discuss religion inspired either laughter or condescending dismissals. When he tried to engage one clergyman in a religious conversation, the man declined talking “shop” and then “joined some ‘divines’ in talk so obscene that Father never would have listened to it [though apparently his son did], joking one another upon their licentiousness in a most shameless manner.” Like any good young American Protestant, Kane drew from the experience a lesson in the superiority of religious voluntarism: “There is no doubt that ours is a priest ridden country . . . [yet] The Voluntary is the best of all systems for the ecclesiastical establishment.”¹² In September 1840, Thomas’s travels experienced a crushing blow when a diligence (a two-story French carriage) ran over his foot and left him severely injured. French doctors wanted to amputate his foot, but Thomas refused. Anticipating death, he felt “joy,” as it would spare him returning “as a dwarf a curiosity an inferior to those who once had been but his equals.” Thomas even prepared a letter to be sent to his parents upon his death in which he envisioned his epitaph: “Faithful below Tom did his duty / And now his soul has gone aloft.” Instead of returning home as planned, Thomas went instead to recover during the winter of 1840–41 in the home of an elderly aristocratic relative, Archibald Morrison, outside Norwich, England. Knowing his son’s propensity for depression, John urged, “Courage, dear Tom, there is a life of usefulness and honour and joyous affection before you yet.” He also encouraged Thomas not to feel bad about being “in the category of the petites.” He may yet grow, John reminded him, and if not, “I am content with you as you are, dear Tom, so are we all,” citing his son’s “great aptitude for intellectual enjoyment.” To his parents, Thomas complained that the health voyage had backfired because, except for a back and head more prone to aches and “stiff and weak joints,” he would return “little changed— childish face & frame unaltered.” A correspondent, perhaps more objective, assured John in January that Thomas “walks with ease & will receive no permanent injury.”¹³ According to Elizabeth, the childless Morrison offered to make Thomas his heir, on the conditions “that he should take the name of Morrison and become a British subject.” However, “neither Kane’s family pride nor his American loyalty would consent” to such an arrangement. Later family tradition added that Thomas lost his “prospects of heirship . . . when he fought Morrison’s bailiff for beating a workman who had fallen asleep under one of their trees.” Only later evidence supports these traditions, but they nevertheless highlight several characteristics of Thomas’s developing identity: his patriotism, concern for social

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injustices, and aggressive assertions of physical masculinity despite his fragile health.¹⁴ When he finally returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1841, Kane began his professional career by helping his father edit an issue of the annual Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and by studying law in his father’s office. In the mid-nineteenth century, legal training was slowly transitioning from the apprenticeship system to academic study. Most lawyers still entered the profession, as did Kane, through an apprenticeship in a law office, which generally consisted of studying and performing minor legal work, such as copying documents.¹⁵ Thomas also strengthened his brotherly bond with Elisha, who after graduating from the University of Virginia returned to Philadelphia to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. While Elisha interned at a Philadelphia hospital, he urged Thomas to “lay aside the consoling Chess Board” and help him prepare for publication “some ideas with regard to Pathological anatomy.” Elisha already envisioned using Thomas’s writing and editing skills to advance his own career, a pattern that shaped both of their lives. Intriguingly, the brothers signed an unusual written contract to ensure that their futures would be intertwined. In September 1842, after his graduation from medical school, Elisha promised to resign his recent naval commission and practice medicine in Philadelphia, contingent on Thomas’s demonstration over the coming year of his ability to “regulate his daily habits” to increase his health. Thomas and Elisha mixed brotherly affection, notions of honor (each committed as a “man of honour”), and the contractual language of young professionals. Thomas clearly revered his older brother, whom he claimed to know “unto the most interior nakedness of his heart’s core.” He wrote his father, “Dear Elish! You are pleased with his deeds and gests so far—eh?—but wait till you see what is to come.”¹⁶ Whether Thomas took the stipulated steps to improve his health is unclear, though he continued to suffer periodic setbacks. The following July, during a health vacation to the elite resort town of Cape May, New Jersey, Thomas complained of “headache nausea and abominable neurologia,” though he also wrote of increased vigor. John thought him “marvelously recruited” and hoped that a winter in Paris would further “build him up” so he could pursue his legal studies. Before embarking, Thomas told Elisha that at five foot three inches tall, he had “stopped growing” but was “far from abandoning hopes of health.”¹⁷ Kane’s increasing religious unorthodoxy also might have prompted the voyage. By this time, he had wandered far from his devout childhood, as he openly admired Catholicism, despised Protestant evangelicalism, and flirted with religious unbelief. The exact impetus for his religious doubt can only be surmised.

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Did a rebellion against religion help establish independence from his pious parents? Had his ill health and depression made him feel abandoned by God? Conversely, had his loss of faith heightened his depression and weakened his health? Did his exposure to European life and philosophy contribute? In addition to these possible factors, the social inequality Thomas observed in Christian churches alienated him from his childhood religion. In 1845, he wrote a revealing letter to Elisha about the “grand dreams I used to have.” Mixing youthful ambition with unorthodoxy, Thomas had desired to “make to me fame” by creating a “religion suited to the 19th century—a religion containing in itself women—slaves—industrial classes—a religion containing itself the principle of its own change and amelioration—finally a religion of movement.” Thomas’s vision represented a harsh critique of contemporary churches, which by implied contrast were stationary and lifeless and discriminated along gender, class, and racial lines. Thomas gave up the project when his “own faith failed . . . I, the Moses grew faint hearted.” One morning, in a “paroxysm of rage,” Thomas burned his religious writings. He then “spoke to Father such words as sent me off within a month to France where I became besotted in selfishness and sin— the great, unforgivable Holy Ghost Sin—unforgivable because unrepentable— indifference!”¹⁸ Even with his possible concern about his son’s religious views, John expressed “unlimited” confidence in Thomas’s judgment as he sailed for France in October 1843. John again emphasized that Thomas’s “only object” was improved health and advised, “Stint yourself in nothing that may promote your bodily or mental improvement.” Such a stay might also increase his son’s political contacts, and John asked President John Tyler and Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur to appoint Thomas an attaché of the American ambassador. However, Lewis Cass (a political ally of John) had returned from France and the attempt failed. John also collected letters of introduction for his son, including one from Upshur “and half a dozen or a dozen from good people to good people.”¹⁹ Thomas’s physical and emotional health was once again central to his experience. Violent seasickness marred his ocean voyage, and he came down with influenza soon after his arrival. In addition, Thomas feared a lump on his back was a tumor, but a French doctor diagnosed it as “only a consequence of the curvature of the spine.” “I still have a chance in the world,” Thomas declared. In early February, a severe toothache (and related “neuralgic pain”) struck him with “such intensity of exquisite torment that it would make a damned soul who has been used to the toasting, broiling, roasting, frying . . . of hell fire for a dozen eternities yell with unrestrainable agony.” Homesickness compounded his physical ills, though private correspondence with John sometimes lifted his spirits.

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While he had “nothing secret” or “unseemly” to share, he nevertheless extolled the ability to “freely commune” with his father. John’s powerful presence even intruded on Thomas’s sleep: “I dream of you almost every night and think of you almost every day.”²⁰ Even with these physical and emotional strains, Thomas’s health gradually improved during his stay. While he still had complaints—his stomach “does not cease, at times to reject it’s food,” his back “does not cease to ache occasionally,” and he suffered from occasional “night flushes”—he had grown stronger. Thomas attributed his improved health to Parisian life, writing, “The eternal dampness of the climate has a most tranquilising sedative effect upon the nerves and the constant commingling of the Society has wondrous efficacy upon dissipating mania melancholia & solitary seeking misanthropes.” Instructions from French doctors also contributed to his better health. Correctly recognizing that Thomas’s problems were not solely physical, they advised him to “go into Society” and not “study more than three hours a day.” Furthermore, they suggested a “nourishing diet, exercise in the open air, long but not violent, Saline & Sulphurous baths &c.” Thomas followed many of these recommendations, even indulging in a “stinking sulphur bath,” and thought that the Parisian lifestyle had proved healthy to “body and soul.”²¹ While in France, Thomas renewed his resolutions for a productive life. “I know that I am made peevish and misanthropic by sickness,” he wrote, but he assured John he would return a “son calculated more to make you happy—at least, less calculated to make you otherwise than the spoilt child T. L. K. who left you two months ago.” Though he would “always be weak, always puny, always ailing,” Thomas stated that “a change has decidedly taken place in my mind,” which allowed him to shuck off a “certain deficiency of vitality—a certain inert supineness.” He promised, “Such as I am, you will find me active—a doing person . . . I will try and feel like our brave Elish’, and believe that at all events it is better to ‘die fighting.’” While he could not hope “to attain the high seats in the great world’s synagogue yet I may succeed in rendering you and Mother happy.”²² Between health crises, Kane worked his way into Parisian society, quickly establishing contacts with French scientists, republicans, and reformers. Letters from the American Philosophical Society opened doors to the French scientific elite, but Kane found that the crowded lecture rooms gave him “cold, headache, nose bleeding.” Turning from science, Kane became acquainted with leading French politicians and philosophers. Elizabeth later stated that he hoped to study the “thoughts and work of those who were laboring unselfishly for the benefit of humanity.” He thus plunged himself into the “living seething ocean

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of French thought” and conversed with “earnest Roman Catholics or Legitimists trying to bring back a lost ideal, or Revolutionary patriots, Communists or Humanitarians.” For instance, Kane became associated with Major Guillaume Tell Poussin, an engineer who had spent time in the United States and was “one of the leading [republican] buglemen.” Poussin charged that French schools ignored America’s “democratic Institutions” and taught an antirepublican version of French history to “scare” students and make them “most excellent tools for the present boss politicians of France.” Poussin hoped to write his own history to correct this situation, and Kane asked his father to send a history of the United States to aid in the project. Poussin’s book on American history went through several French editions and was later translated and published in Philadelphia. Kane also renewed his acquaintance with the leading French romantic poet Alfred De Vigny, whom he had met on his first stay in Paris; according to Kane, Vigny “received me enthusiastically well” and “gave me something of a little party, at once.”²³ Kane’s contacts also included Armand Marrast, editor of the leading republican newspaper Le National and a “very distinguished man here.” Le National advocated a variety of reforms, including an extension of the electoral franchise and an attack on industrial excesses, but rejected socialism, seeking to ameliorate the effects of capitalism on the working classes rather than replace capitalism itself. In 1862, a Mormon acquaintance wrote that Kane “for a long time” had been a “correspondent of the newspaper Le National.” Much later, Pat similarly stated that Thomas had been “known as one of the prominent contributors to the National, the leading organ of the French democracy.” While such claims seem inflated, perhaps Kane contributed some articles to the paper, both while in France and after his return. On one occasion, Kane arranged for French newspapers, including Le National, to publish anonymous articles he had written to support legal claims his father represented against the French government for destruction of American property on board a ship. John hoped to net ten thousand dollars for his work, but Thomas failed in his efforts. While his initial foray into manipulation of the press proved ineffectual, Kane later regularly applied similar techniques in his reform campaigns.²⁴ Most significantly, Kane met (and became a sometime disciple of ) Auguste Comte, the father of positivism, whose philosophy fueled both his humanitarian drive and his religious unorthodoxy. Comte, still a relatively unknown philosopher at the time of Kane’s visit, published the main aspects of his philosophical system in his forbidding six-volume Cours de philosophie positive between 1830 and 1842. His philosophy of history, elaborated in his “Law of the Three Stages,” posited that humankind had moved through three distinct eras: theological,

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metaphysical, and scientific (also termed positive). Anthropomorphic gods had given way to ideas, which would then be overcome by scientific observations. Comte classified all sciences hierarchically, and he envisioned the creation of a science of society (sociology), the “Queen of the Sciences.” Following the publication of the Cours, Comte turned his attention largely to the creation of a Religion of Humanity. In this scheme, Collective Humanity replaced God as the proper object of worship, and Comte organized a religion with positivist rituals, sacraments, and saints. Comte also coined the term “altruism” to emphasize the ethical dimension of the Religion of Humanity—service to others and placing their interests above one’s own.²⁵ Years after Thomas’s death, Pat wrote that he established a friendship with Comte “which continued unbroken until” Comte’s death in 1857. The exact nature of the relationship remains hazy; Kane did not mention Comte in his letters home. In 1851, he anonymously sent the impoverished Comte substantial financial assistance (three hundred francs). In severe straits, Comte relied on the generosity of disciples and friends, and he had found an American patron in Horace Binney Wallace. Besides their interest in Comte, Wallace and Kane shared many similarities: born to prominent Philadelphia families, both were intermittent lawyers, pseudonymous authors, and sufferers from ill-health and depression. In April 1851, Wallace visited Comte and promised the philosopher an annuity of five hundred francs. Excited by this newfound admirer (whom Comte considered his foremost American disciple and “principal temporal patron”), Comte wrote that Wallace had informed him of the existence of a “positivist center” in Philadelphia. Pat connected Wallace with his brother, and it is likely that Kane formed part of the Philadelphia group; perhaps his donation was intended to fulfill part of Wallace’s annuity. In a letter, Comte praised his anonymous supporter (Kane) for “supporting (causing to live) the founder of the Religion of Humanity,” which would allow him the “just independence which is proper for the new priesthood.”²⁶ Besides Kane and Wallace, few Americans had direct contact with Comte. Certainly, few deciphered Comte’s dense prose until the British writer Harriet Martineau translated and condensed the Cours into two English volumes in 1853. Most Americans knew Comte only through the jeremiads of Protestant critics who complained about his philosophy, and even more vehemently, his Religion of Humanity. The Kanes’ Presbyterian minister in the 1850s (and Thomas’s future brother-in-law), Charles W. Shields, wrote articles and a book critiquing Comte. Comte remained a target for ministerial barbs throughout the century, as he and his system of positivism symbolized for many Protestant thinkers the attempt to limit knowledge to observable phenomena, replace

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God with humanity, and reduce religion to ethical beliefs and behavior. Not all Americans, however, rejected Comte. A handful of dedicated disciples emerged in the 1850s and 1860s; for these “late Victorian skeptics,” Comte’s Religion of Humanity became a “surrogate religion.” Others, like the southern intellectual George Frederick Holmes and radical New England Unitarians, incorporated much of Comte’s philosophy into their own worldview.²⁷ Comte’s lasting influence on Kane is difficult to delineate, partly because Kane referred to him by name only in one document, as he jotted down in his journal Comte’s address in Paris. His personal religion, though, often sounded Comtean notes. For instance, in 1852, he told his fiancée that he hoped her religion would not be confined within “four walls, but . . . [within] the mighty congregation of Humanity, the one and only Holy Catholic Church which Christ has founded.” Likewise, he discouraged her from reading theological books, groaning that he had already “gone through the Inquisition.” He continued: “Have I not told you my lamentable experience, first with the Theologians, and then (they are the same evil brood precisely under another name) with the Metaphysicians?” His description of his experience transitioning from theology to metaphysics and beyond nicely fits Comte’s Law of the Three Stages (through which Comte believed both individuals and societies must pass). Kane’s attraction to sociology, evident in his later approaches to Mormonism and slavery, also retained traces of Comte’s influence.²⁸ Perhaps partly inspired by his contacts with Comte, Kane became increasingly unorthodox during his second trip to France. Among the community of American émigrés and tourists, he found a surprising number of Catholics, including many converts. Kane visited a French convent to see a young American convert, a Miss Cooke, and used his description to satirize the anti-Catholic literature of the Maria Monk genre. (In 1836, Monk had published a best-selling but fraudulent account of the sexual liaisons between priests and nuns and the murder of the resulting infants in a Canadian convent.) He claimed he expected to find the convent with “iron-barred windows stuck in a rusty stone wall that looks like a jail,” housing “emaciated” and “ghastly women with complexions something between the colour of Alm’s house subjects’ and mustard plasters.” By contrast, he found Miss Cooke “wholesomely fat” and described the convent as richly decorated and populated by “many graceful little girls, and some sweet faced elder ones, many elegantly attired ladies, and a few distingué looking gentlemen.” Kane concluded, “their Church has a great deal of reason on its side and perhaps if I were a Christian I might become Catholic.” Like many contemporaries, he admired the aesthetics and ritual power of Catholicism, though he did not join some American travelers along the road to Rome. Still, Kane de-

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spised the hypocrisy he saw in French Catholicism. He described the scene at a Parisian “Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday”: “The good Catholics therefore make as much of it as sailors do of their last day on shore . . . They eat to excess, drink to excess, commit sexual wickedness to excess, and make fools as well as beasts of themselves.”²⁹ Kane had moved far beyond his Presbyterian roots. Whereas on his earlier ocean voyage, he had self-righteously refused to play cards, he now expressed disgust with the “Pharisaical Americans” clustered to play Old Maid. He sarcastically pledged to his mother that he would avoid the long list of frequently condemned evangelical vices: “I’ll not drink juleps or cocktails, nor cobblers, nor go to horse races, cockfights or theatres, nor keep a setter dog, sulky & trotter, or mistress, nor chew tobacco, smoke, or snuff, nor play taro cards or billiards, nor marry a chambermaid.” Indeed, Kane wrote, rising to his own rhetoric, “I will try to be a good child, a comfort & not a torment to you and Papa and possibly even go to church every Sunday, and say the Sermon was good by pious falsehood.” He would further support the “diverse respective Bible Tract, Missionary and other Societies, and persecute the Papist Malignants, Jesuits included.” Not only evangelical religion, but evangelical reform—the “Bible Tract, Missionary and other Societies”—had come under Kane’s condemnation.³⁰ With the passing of his orthodoxy, Kane felt a loss. In early 1844, he wistfully thought of the “sad and sweet” memories conjured by Bible reading, “when I used to be so contented with my thin Sunday School piety . . . and I could not go to sleep before I said my prayers.” At times, he still looked to religion for comfort, as when he found solace during sickness by singing “silent inward Quaker Hymns of gratitude to God.” Even so, Kane’s two European voyages had planted him firmly on the path toward unorthodoxy, if not outright unbelief. His experience negotiating his devout childhood, Comte’s philosophical appeal, and the allure of Catholicism demonstrates the transatlantic nature of religion (and religious doubt) in antebellum America.³¹ Besides his contact with Parisian intellectual, political, and religious life, Kane spent much time with the American community in Paris. John happily reported to Elisha that Thomas had met “all the best Americans.” Thomas added, “I know more Americans than ever I did before in my life.” To prepare himself for the return to Philadelphia drudgery, he told his father that he traded intellectual stimulation for “the uninteresting and the common place.” Indeed, he avoided the “society of brilliant minds” and found happiness “in the society of simpletons of every grade” by “disclaiming all independence of thought whatsoever,” thus becoming “more & more fitted for the little Philadelphia meridian— more and more fitted for a citizen of the U.S.” Accordingly, he devoted “every

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single evening to socialities” and described a seemingly endless procession of balls, dinners, receptions, music parties, and tea drinkings, primarily with other Americans.³² Despite his overflowing social calendar, Kane rarely referred to women in his letters home. He disparaged the sexual immorality of other young Americans, many of whom he described as “coarse & sensual.” Paris had a well-deserved reputation of forbidden sexuality for young American men. Nineteenth-century historian Francis Parkman explained, “If a man has a mind to amuse himself there is no place like it on earth . . . if you want to make an absolute beast of yourself, without varnish or gilding, it can be done to the utmost perfection.” At least in his letters home, Kane referred to this side of Paris only to condemn it. Tellingly, when Elisha needed the “protecting influences” of some Parisian “pistolet d’amour” (condoms), he turned not to Thomas, but to another friend.³³ As during his earlier voyage, costs quickly mounted. Thomas informed his father, “I am leading a most extravagant life.” He had come to agree with John’s advice “that it would be the worst possible economy to defeat the very ends of my expenditure by a parsimony—which, alas! is not to be borne by an invalid.” Naturally given to hyperbole, he wrote: “The present is your last great effort to give me health. It must necessarily be my last also and it is my duty for your sake to do faithfully my best sparing no means.” His initial lodging was a “hell hole,” and his new one, in the “centre of the American district,” cost more than he anticipated. By mid-December, he had spent $250 for clothes alone. John sent $300 for a Christmas gift and expressed approval that Thomas had “rid himself of the nonsense of a half price mode of living.” Nevertheless, Thomas felt a need to justify his expenditures, particularly those that seemed frivolous (like the “Milk for dinner & the costly saltwater baths” recommended by his doctor and the “white gloves & other toilette expenses prescribed by Society”). By late January 1844, Thomas had spent the $400 he had taken with him, as well as the Christmas money, and yet lacked funds for the return trip. In all, John made a “fresh $920 contribution” toward “tinkering” on his son’s “unsound body.”³⁴ Even with the expenses, John expressed full satisfaction with Thomas’s stay in Europe. To Elisha, he wrote that Thomas is unquestionably mended in health, not much, yet appreciably . . . and he has renewed consciousness of mental vigour, and has got himself rid of a legion of thick coming fancies, that marred his happiness here and threatened his usefulness in after life. He looks on the world with more sympathy, and begins to believe that worth and honour and all that is valuable in character and life are more equally distributed than he thought before. And he will come, he

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says, more tolerant of some things, less fascinated by the memory of others, prepared to take his place in the ranks, and do battle in the great strife of mankind. More than all, he will come home an American.

While pleased with the immediate effects, Thomas’s parents later regretted his European trips, lamenting (in Jane’s words) “that we ever suffered him to cajole us into believing he would die if he stayed at home. It is a mercy his morals weren’t ruined, all the wickedness he saw.” His morals (if not his religious beliefs) seem to have survived, and upon his return, Thomas chose to “do battle in the great strife of mankind” by choosing his “place in the ranks” of the reformers.³⁵

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Beginnings of Reform

As he prepared to return home from his second European voyage at the age of twenty-two in 1844, Kane assured his mother that his time in Europe had turned him into a conservative. She had correctly predicted that he would “become disenchanted of Paris by going back to it”: “I have become more American, and have undergone (I believe all undergo it once in their youth) the change to a wholesome conservatism of ideas. Instead of coming back to you a destructive, a radical or even a Fourierite, instead of aiming to destroy Marriage or enfranchise Womankind; you will find me to have become a lover of the respectabilities, an abhorrer of social changes, and one content to let our human race take care of itself. You will also find me less of a rolling stone in disposition than I have been, I trust.” Elizabeth later described Kane’s transformation quite differently: “On his return to the United States from France in 1844, he threw himself with youthful heat into numerous reform movements of which the general drift was an introduction of advanced French politics into America.” Kane’s actions suggest that he told his mother what she undoubtedly wished to hear; in spite of his protests, he had become a “rolling stone,” who loathed the “respectabilities” and agitated for “social changes.” As Elizabeth affirmed, his experience in Europe vaulted him into the interrelated social movements commonly known as antebellum reform.¹ A wide variety of campaigns for social change—some mutually reinforcing, others antagonistic to each other—marked the decades before the Civil War. The tremendous outpouring of energy targeted nearly every conceivable social ill of American society, including Sabbath-breaking, a scarcity of Bibles and religious tracts among the urban poor and in the unchurched West, dueling, the death penalty, the threat posed by Catholic immigrants, the treatment of pris-

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oners and the insane, the lack of women’s rights, prostitution, and slavery. In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson captured the spirit of the times: “In the history of the world the doctrine of Reform had never such scope as at the present hour” as reformers sought to improve “Christianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the laboratory; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the new spirit.” Like many of his contemporaries, Kane felt the “call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities, and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer.” In Emerson’s romantic view, a reformer would face the world as a “brave and upright man” who would stand against injustices and “find or cut a straight road to everything excellent in the earth, and not only go honorably himself, but make it easier for all who follow him.”² At first glance, Kane’s reform activities—abolition of capital punishment, peace, antislavery, women’s rights, education for the poor, and protection of religious minorities—seem eclectic. A range of interests, however, was hardly unusual among mid-century reformers, and both reformers and later historians have referred to a “sisterhood of reform.” In addition, Kane’s choices make more sense in the context of the different traditions of antebellum reformers. His life illuminates a significant strain of reformers that belies many of the stereotypes of and assumptions about nineteenth-century reformers. Historians have located the roots of the reforming impulse in the social, economic, cultural, and religious transformations that marked the era between the American Revolution and the Civil War. The broad transition from a society marked by hierarchy and deference to elites to one governed by mass democracy fostered a reform mentality. The integration of the nation into an expanding market economy, combined with advances in transportation that connected the nation through roads, canals, and eventually railroads, both enabled the work of reformers and created many of the conditions against which they fought. A culture of gentility and sentimentality, once the preserve of the aristocratic elite, seeped downward, incorporating the middle class in its dictates and inspiring efforts in reform. Changes in gender roles created a public space for women in reform associations. Improvements in printing technology allowed reformers to cheaply and rapidly diffuse their ideas through the penny press and inexpensive pamphlets and books.³ Most crucially, historians have generally depicted antebellum reform as springing from the synthesis of evangelicalism and Whig politics. Evangelical reformers created a series of interrelated and interdenominational voluntary societies, which historians have termed the “Benevolent Empire” or the “United Evangelical Front,” to fight against a slew of moral evils. Drawing often on the

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examples of British evangelicals, the Benevolent Empire included organizations designed to distribute religious tracts and Bibles, foster revivalism, fight the abuse of alcohol, and create Sunday Schools for poor urban children. In addition, the antislavery movement initially derived much of its energy from evangelical reformers. Participants in the Benevolent Empire pioneered national reform organizations and innovatively used new printing technologies to spread their gospel of reform. While evangelical reformers could be found throughout the nation, they were particularly influential in New England and among the Yankee migrants concentrated in upstate New York and the Old Northwest. In general, they voted Whig, shared that party’s distrust of cultural and religious diversity as well as its deference to elites, and envisioned a well-ordered society built on Christian morality.⁴ While evangelical reformers have been portrayed as everything from optimistic perfectionists sincerely seeking the betterment of their fellows to repressive elites cynically seeking to control others, they have long occupied the center stage in the narrative of antebellum reform.⁵ Indeed, the intense debate surrounding them has obscured other important strains of reform. Garrisonian radical abolitionists grew out of, and eventually rejected, evangelical reform culture. Transcendentalists like Emerson, either liberal Unitarians or religiously unorthodox, have long been recognized as a crucial group of reformers. Communitarian groups and radical new religions articulated other variants of the reform tradition. Kane exemplifies social reformers who combined anti-evangelicalism, romanticism, and a political loyalty to the Democratic Party. In response to the evangelical culture of religion and reform, they advanced an alternative vision that emphasized the protection of liberty and the accompanying toleration of religious and cultural pluralism. While evangelical reformers clustered in the Whig Party, those like Kane participated in the reform wing of the Democratic Party, the very existence of which is often obscured in historical portrayals of the era because most antebellum Democrats defended slavery. They adhered to a romantic humanitarianism that sought to speak on behalf of the oppressed and the downtrodden. Though slighted by historians, these anti-evangelical Democrats contributed greatly to the reforms of the era, including what became the culmination of antebellum reform: the abolition of slavery. Even when reformers like Kane made tactical coalitions with evangelical reformers (as in the antislavery movement), they had distinctive rationales and motivations. Kane’s life provides a window onto this culture of social reformers.⁶ The western writer Bernard De Voto memorably (if uncharitably) described Kane: “He was a romantic and neurotic young man, a sentimental humani-

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tarian, the kind of miniature Gerrit Smith who loved all good works and by the hundred obstructed the path of serious reformers.” Leaving aside, for now, the question of the efficacy of Kane’s reform efforts, De Voto’s description gives some insights into Kane’s relationship with reform. The adjectives fit; Kane was romantic, neurotic, and sentimental. Though somewhat misguided, De Voto’s comparison of Kane with Gerrit Smith helps clarify Kane’s place in antebellum reform. Kane and Smith shared many similarities. A wealthy New York land developer, Smith identified himself with radical abolitionism, ultimately giving assistance to John Brown’s failed raid on Harper’s Ferry. Both Kane and Smith came from privileged backgrounds and inherited prosperity and prestige. Even so, both considered themselves (and were seen by others) as “passionate outsiders,” in the words of Smith’s biographer, who defined themselves against the prevailing conventions of their time by defending socially marginal groups.⁷ The differences between Kane and Smith are at least as instructive as the similarities for situating Kane in antebellum reform. Smith grew out of the evangelical reform movement and financially supported the various arms of the Benevolent Empire. His reform activities fell either within mainstream evangelical reform, such as temperance, or at its more radical edges, including women’s rights and abolitionism. While his abolitionism eventually moved him beyond evangelical reform, his religious vision still inspired his activities. Millennialism fueled Smith’s radicalism, and he worked to create a “heaven on Earth, governed by Bible politics.” In addition, Smith became a key player in the Liberty Party in the 1840s and 1850s, which insisted on purity in politics and criticized abolitionists who worked for the less radical Free Soil Party or from within the two major political parties. By contrast, Kane despised radical evangelicalism and “Bible politics,” though his own unorthodox religious vision was crucial to his reforming efforts. Finally, Kane reconciled himself to political impurity, preferring to pursue reform through the Democratic Party and the Free Soil movement.⁸ Events soon after his return from Paris in 1844 solidified Kane’s reform trajectory. In March, John expressed his exasperation with evangelical reformers: “The fanaticism of the times is taking a new direction. It has run itself nearly out of breath on Abolition and Temperance: and now it has taken hold of the Bible.” A controversy over Catholic objections to the reading of the Protestant Bible in Philadelphia public schools had simmered during the preceding few years. Immigration had doubled the number of Catholics in the city in the past decade. Political, economic, and religious tensions between the largely Irish immigrants and other Philadelphians had escalated in the early 1840s (as they had in other large northeastern cities). In 1842, nearly one hundred Philadelphia

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ministers created the American Protestant Association to combat the religious evils of popery (Catholics called it the “American persecution association”). An anti-immigrant political party, the Native American Party, gradually coalesced in the city during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Catholic complaints about the intolerant tone of the public schools—including the use of the King James Bible, Protestant hymns, and history books dripping with anti-Catholicism— united nativists to protect the Protestant atmosphere of the schools.⁹ The issue caught fire in part because of the perceived threat to two key elements of evangelical reform culture: “Bible societies and educational charities.” The nativists, who saw themselves as protectors of American culture, were largely evangelical and Whig. Their opponents came mostly from the Democratic Party, which had already entered into a strategic alliance with Irish voters and adhered to a vision of a more ethnically and religiously heterogeneous society. Given his ecumenical tendencies and staunch Democratic beliefs, John Kane sympathized with the Catholics. Complaints by the Irish-born Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, Francis Patrick Kenrick, led to a compromise in 1842 that allowed Catholic students to opt out of the Protestant Bible reading but continued to ban the Catholic Bible from schools.¹⁰ Nativist ire increased in early 1844 following false rumors that the Catholic director of the school district in heavily Irish Kensington had ordered the end of daily Bible readings. The controversy would be “really farcical,” John wrote, if it did not threaten to be “dangerous.” He particularly disparaged the nativist political party and its attempt to “protect our consciences from foreign domination.” Indeed, John viewed the party as an ungodly amalgamation of evangelical reformers—“most of the brawling Antimasons of ten years ago, the ultra temperance reformed drunkards, the abolitionists of Pennsylvania Hall memory, the ultra intolerant of our Protestant clergy”—with “some of the worst of the pipe laying Whigs, and unhappily, a good many of the labouring class of democrats.” To the Kanes, the nativists represented evangelical reform run amok.¹¹ Violence soon erupted in the streets of Philadelphia. In early May 1844, the nativists planned a provocative mass rally in Kensington. After being driven off by a crowd of Irish Catholics, they planned an even larger meeting three days later, which attracted an audience of three thousand. Tensions turned violent and quickly escalated into full-scale riots for three days, which left some twenty dead (both Irish and nativists), large sections of Kensington destroyed, and two Catholic churches in ashes. The ineffectual response to the riots by the outnumbered police and militia led Philadelphia’s elite, including John, to organize citizens’ patrols to impose law and order. According to John, the riots gave Thomas—who had returned home with “sundry good resolves to mingle with

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the World around him and be a part of it”—a “fair opportunity of testing the strength both of these resolves and of his bodily frame.” John wrote Elisha that “Tom proved his corporal energy by mounting guard with a musket for four nights together.” The civilian patrols secured an uneasy peace that lasted until July, when another spasm of violence rocked the city. John later earned opprobrium as Pennsylvania attorney general for bringing criminal charges against some of the rioters. Philadelphians took different lessons from the riots. Many saw the need to replace the current police force, which was based on political patronage, with professionals. Others flocked to the Native American Party, which surged in popularity.¹² The controversy introduced Thomas to issues, particularly how to deal with pluralism and protect religious liberty, that animated his future career in reform. After the riots, Thomas satirically described a conversation he had with “St. Cornelius,” Cornelius C. Cuyler, the Kanes’ pastor and a leader in the anti-Catholic movement. Cuyler dominated the conversation with “sentences from the Bible, and Tract Society exhortations to me as a ‘dear youth,’” Thomas wrote. Besides blaming Catholics for the riots, Cuyler lectured Thomas that American religious pluralism should not extend beyond Protestantism, as “no Church ought to exist contrary to the wishes of the great part of the population of a Country.” Cuyler, a “man active in sending Missionaries among all manner of Heathen Majorities,” failed to see the irony. For Thomas, the riots and the attitude Cuyler represented confirmed his distrust of evangelical reformers and inspired his commitment to protect religious minorities.¹³ During these years, Thomas continually derided evangelical religion. One Sunday, he heard a “dreadful” noise coming from “one of the Methodist Meeting Houses where the law permits wicked people to make lunatics nearly as fast as the Hospitals can cure them.” Thomas’s reaction reflected both his upperclass sensibilities (as Methodists tended to be drawn from the middle and lower classes) and his distaste for evangelicalism. He also reveled in using his heterodoxy to needle his devout family. In 1850, he told his sister that he had attended a “Papist Roman Catholic Church,” which was “built of brick not the least of the colour of the unchaste foreign lady [the biblical Whore of Babylon] to whom Protestants suppose it dedicated.” Notwithstanding his occasional pro-Catholic rhetoric, Thomas disdained everything he perceived as religious fanaticism. In 1845, he referred to “military Protestants and Catholics” as “equal bores to decent people” and suggested it would “not be a loss to the community” if they were “allowed to burn each other with mutual faggots.”¹⁴ Though he flirted with outright atheism, Kane settled for heterodoxy. Like most other nineteenth-century intellectuals who departed from conventional be-

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lief, he remained deeply interested in religious questions. Indeed, he constructed a personal religion that blended strands of Comte’s Religion of Humanity with Christian asceticism. Elizabeth later described him as “an ascetic among freelivers, and a Christian in an uncomfortably literal way” for his “Philadelphia Old School Presbyterian household.” In 1846, Kane referred to John Chrysostom, the celebrated fourth-century bishop-preacher, as his patron saint, perhaps because of Chrysostom’s advocacy of a social Christianity concerned with the spiritual and temporal needs of the poor. Kane also derived his asceticism from Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, a popular devotional manual by a fifteenthcentury German mystic, which “contained the whole system of [his] moral conduct.” In 1852, Kane thought that he had “not lived altogether so inconsistently under this Philosophy,” as he had strived to “invest an Estate in Poverty . . . [and] to labor for obscurity.” His copy of The Imitation had various prints, including a painting that Kane particularly admired for its depiction of Jesus as a “cheerful practical reformer.” Contemporary Christianity, he thought, exalted form over substance and materialism over reforming society’s ills. Kane continued to gravitate toward Comte’s emphasis on the divinity of humankind and his ethics of altruism. At times he envisioned himself as outside the Christian fold. On Easter Sunday 1852, Kane began a journal entry, “If I were a Christian.” His religious journey, which combined a longing for spirituality and a deep suspicion of traditional religion, was a typically romantic stance.¹⁵ During the months following the riots, Kane’s attention also turned to politics, and his involvement in the presidential campaign of 1844 helped determine his political allegiances. John Tyler, who had assumed the presidency upon William Henry Harrison’s death, had quickly alienated the Whigs who had elected him. Since the Whigs refused to renominate Tyler, no incumbent would defend the office and the race seemed wide open. The Kanes initially supported the renomination of ex-president Martin Van Buren as the Democratic candidate. Shortly before the Democratic convention, however, Van Buren sank his own chances, which then seemed secure, by opposing the immediate annexation of Texas because it would add another slave state to the Union. In 1836, Texans had declared their independence from Mexico and sought annexation; Andrew Jackson had demurred, wary of both a war with Mexico and northern opposition. The issue, with its sectional overtones, continued to simmer and became central to the 1844 campaign. Like most other Democrats, John supported the annexation of Texas and saw Van Buren’s actions as “selfishness, recklessness as to the position and interests of his friends,” rather than a principled stand against slavery.¹⁶ By contrast, the Texas issue led to Thomas’s first discernable stirrings of anti-

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slavery thought, as he decided early in the campaign to vote for the Whig candidate Henry Clay, who initially opposed annexation. “Many a Democrat” in the North, Thomas thought, would likewise view the “Texas question as supreme” and vote for Clay. Slavery thus led to Thomas’s first discontent with the Democratic Party and would lead to an increasingly rocky relationship with the party over the next seventeen years. Clay soon retreated from his earlier position, and Thomas deemed that political calculations (desire for the southern vote), not principle, had guided Clay. Disillusioned, Thomas returned to the Democratic fold: “As for the man Clay Dust he is, and to Dust and dirt may he return.”¹⁷ Even during his short-lived attraction to Clay, Thomas recognized that a Democratic victory would prove beneficial to the Kane family’s political fortunes. He exulted to Elisha that John counted James K. Polk, the Democratic nominee after Van Buren’s fall, as a friend. John had become acquainted with Polk while he served on the French Commission in the 1830s, and Polk was an up-and-coming congressman from Tennessee. Thomas later claimed that Polk’s “political beginning . . . was a private letter from grand old General Jackson” introducing him to John, who became known as Polk’s “conscience keeper.” Following Polk’s nomination, George Dallas, a Philadelphia lawyer and close political ally and friend of John, was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. Thomas enthusiastically followed his father into campaign work for Polk and Dallas.¹⁸ During the campaign, Polk issued only one public statement, a letter to John on tariff policy that became known as the “Kane letter.” Polk, who had a history of free trade principles, sought to placate the protectionist sentiment of Pennsylvania through a carefully worded letter that declared opposition to protectionism in principle but support for a tariff to raise revenue. As Polk intended, Kane published the letter, which played a key role in persuading the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania to vote Democratic. John recalled that the letter became “the leading document on the canvass, was assailed and vindicated everywhere, and undoubtedly it made its author the President.” Thomas, who later that year considered establishing a “free trade club in Philadelphia,” opposed the protective tariff. Nevertheless, he hoped his father would “succeed in throwing as much dust” in the eyes of pro-tariff voters “as is necessary to elect the good free trade man of Tennessee.” John became a prominent political operative in the Polk campaign, dispensing advice to the candidate on Pennsylvania politics and supporting Polk (probably with Thomas’s assistance) through the columns of the state’s most influential Democratic newspaper, the Pennsylvanian (of which he was then the “virtual Editor”). As the campaign unfolded, Thomas became increasingly hopeful that a Polk victory would open political doors for his father, even envisioning scenarios that would “throw the great District Justiceship of the

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United States upon the revered but slightly bald head of the dear Papa.” Though unlikely, this would give John a lucrative lifetime position and expand his political and social influence.¹⁹ On election day, Democrats triumphed in both Pennsylvania and the nation. Polk’s election inspired a scramble for available patronage. John was seriously mentioned, and recommended by Dallas and intimates of former President Jackson, as a possibility for Polk’s cabinet. However, John decided not to press personally his case in Washington, and Thomas lamented the lost possibility. Even so, John wrote Elisha that Polk “professes singular regard” to himself, “perhaps because I did rather more than any man in the country to elect him, and ask no favours; but perhaps also because he is the good and true hearted man I have always thought him.” John also had his eyes on positions closer to home, and Pennsylvania’s incoming Democratic governor Francis Shunk soon appointed him to the post of attorney general, coveted because of its extensive patronage. The position, John told Elisha, would give him the “means of forwarding him [Thomas] in his profession.” Thomas similarly hoped that it would allow John to “give me a push; for I start with locked wheels, F[ather] having no business at all—the Whig Merchants almost hating him and his son with him of course; which son starts with the disadvantages of a green youthful appearance, and an utter destitution of acquaintanceship.”²⁰ John’s political ascent also gave his son the opportunity to enter the world of the press. Under his father’s tutelage, Thomas cut his political teeth writing anonymous editorials for the Pennsylvanian. In August 1845, John, complaining of the previous editor’s neglect, arranged for a new group to purchase the paper. Even before the purchase, he asserted, “I am myself with my son and deputies the last refuge of the Pennsylvanian’s first column,” citing a recent article that Thomas had translated from the Parisian paper Le National.²¹ Thomas’s writing experience extended beyond his father’s networks as he formed a “club of young men, to influence the Public Press.” His future wife Elizabeth explained that they published articles “wherever they could get them” aimed at a broad reform agenda: “against all unnecessary Laws, against Capital Punishment, Against Wars, against all unnecessary Imprisonment—for the Rights of Man but Woman first—and the Abolition of Slavery.” In a similar vein, Thomas helped form a “debating club.” A notebook among his papers contains descriptions of a secretive group in 1847, with the three central participants identified by Latin names that refer to virtues of an ideal Roman man: Ius (justice, duty), Virtus (courage, valor), and Caritas (love, esteem). The participants, who saw themselves at the “beginnings of an Herculean Task never to be ended save in most glorious triumph,” discussed ways to campaign against a variety of so-

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cial harms (including the “Factory System” and the “evils which arise from the priesthood”) through their writing. Unfortunately, the exact nature and extent of Thomas’s newspaper work is impossible to determine, hidden in long-forgotten and anonymous editorials in local newspapers. Thomas’s voluminous anonymous writings, Elizabeth asserted, appeared “both in French and English, in newspapers and periodicals,” but he “destroyed all his papers and letters, never designing that any memorials of his life should see the light.”²² In part, Kane wrote anonymously to protect his standing as an honorable gentleman, a sensibility already rapidly passing from the American political scene. Under this ethos, gentlemen participated in political debates through the press anonymously or pseudonymously to preserve their reputations, since newspaper editors and writers could not generally claim status as gentlemen. In addition, Kane’s anonymous writings, plus his destruction of his newspaper work, suggest his self-identify as one who manipulated events from behind the scenes, who pulled the strings without leaving traces. Finally, anonymous authorship may have resulted from his desire for self-denying obscurity in the ascetic tradition. Kane’s writing for the press cultivated his literary skills, gave him contact with newspaper editors, and established a pattern that he used to great effect in his future reform campaigns.²³ During 1844, Thomas also turned his reform efforts to the public schools. He relished music, particularly playing the piano and singing. During a period of depression a few years later, he wrote that music had “relieved my weariness of living” and made “time something to be valued, not destroyed.” With his cousin Robert Patterson, Thomas “got music introduced” to the public school curriculum. A younger brother wrote, “I am taught music I like it very much and so do most of the other boys.” Thomas’s first foray into reform imitated his father’s first involvement in reform. In 1820, John helped organize the Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, now the oldest music society in the nation in continuous existence, to promote music through public concerts.²⁴ Soon after, Kane engaged in his first organized reform activity: the campaign to abolish capital punishment. Pennsylvania had long been central to movements against the death penalty in the United States. Influenced by William Penn’s Quakerism, Pennsylvania’s seventeenth-century criminal code declared only murder and treason as capital crimes, a stark contrast with the lengthy lists in other colonies. In 1718, however, England imposed its much harsher criminal code on the colony. In colonial and Revolutionary America, public executions were carefully scripted community events, opportunities for civil and religious elites to reinforce social order. After the Revolution, a broad campaign of penal reform swept the new nation, led in part by Philadelphian Benjamin Rush and

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influenced by Enlightenment philosophy. Pennsylvania acted first, eliminating the death penalty for robbery, burglary, and sodomy in 1786 and then for all crimes except first-degree murder and treason in 1794. The state also experimented with a penitentiary system, designed to reform criminals through solitude rather than severe punishments. Despite some victories, however, there was a general retreat from reform of prisons and the death penalty in the early 1800s.²⁵ Beginning in the 1820s, and reaching a high point in the 1840s, a renewed movement became a key reform in antebellum America. An early triumph forced executions from the public square to behind prison walls, as elites now believed public hangings, rather than bolstering community morality and order, hardened individuals’ sensitivities and increased crime. Prison reformers again pushed for penitentiaries not only to punish but also to reform criminals. Attempts to abolish the death penalty remained sporadic and local until a national campaign coalesced in the mid-1840s. The Pennsylvania Freeman stated in 1844, “The subject of capital punishment is claiming much and increasing attention, not only in our own State, but in many other parts of the country.” Leading reformers such as Wendell Phillips, John L. O’Sullivan, John Greenleaf Whittier, Horace Greeley, and William Lloyd Garrison took up the cause. Pamphlets, newspaper articles, and government reports—on both sides of the issue—were widely distributed. In 1844, a New York Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment was founded, followed the next year by organizations in Massachusetts and Philadelphia and a national group, the American Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.²⁶ The bipartisan campaign drew on a host of religious, pragmatic, and philosophical arguments. In part, reformers responded to a broader romantic revulsion against intentionally inflicted pain. For Democrats, the death penalty “deprived individuals of the opportunity to learn how to govern their own lives” and perpetuated social injustice, as it targeted socially marginal victims (by virtue of race, nationality, or poverty). Whigs joined the campaign because they viewed capital punishment “as an impediment to the development of the kind of society they dreamed of fashioning: industrious, disciplined, and culturally homogenous.”²⁷ In 1845, Kane joined the Philadelphia Society for Promoting the Abolition of Capital Punishment. In June, the society issued a widely printed public letter, which Kane signed along with twenty-four others, laying out its arguments against the death penalty. The statement contrasted Pennsylvania’s “bold and judicious” history of prison reform with its continuing “savage and unchristian” laws. “Essentially evil in its nature,” capital punishment contributed to a cycle

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of violence and inspired rather than deterred crime. On a practical level, the specter of the death penalty made juries unwilling to convict defendants of capital crimes. The society characterized its opponents as driven by a “deep-rooted spirit of malignity, which delights in human suffering, and which believes that it serves God when it can clothe passion with the thin mask of justice.” Finally, the society placed itself within a transatlantic reform context, noting either the full or partial abolition of the death penalty in Great Britain, Tuscany, Belgium, and Russia.²⁸ In November 1845, the national organization convened its first meeting in Philadelphia. On the first evening, the “extremely large audience” listened to various speakers, including Greeley, a Whig and the young editor of the New York Tribune, and two Philadelphians with connections to the Kane family— Henry S. Patterson (John’s close friend and president of the Philadelphia society) and William D. Kelley (one of John’s deputies as attorney general). The following day, the convention selected Vice President George Dallas as president of the society and chose Thomas as one of its two secretaries. In that capacity, he likely prepared copies of the proceedings for the press, which first appeared in the Pennsylvanian, and probably wrote articles on behalf of the movement.²⁹ The campaign against capital punishment may have contributed to Thomas’s growing cynicism toward evangelical religion. Opponents of the death penalty were often (but by no means exclusively) religiously unorthodox or Unitarians and Universalists, who emphasized God’s mercy and universal salvation. Proponents included leading evangelical ministers (though exceptions existed, such as the young Henry Ward Beecher), who looked to biblical justifications for the death penalty. One historian has argued, “No social issue in antebellum America was as divided along sectarian lines as the question of capital punishment.” Joining the crusade against the death penalty also gave Kane an important entrée into the wider reform community. Like Kane, many of the other participants in the anti-gallows campaign were young, ambitious reformers. For instance, Greeley, a vice president of the national society, became Kane’s friend and ally, and many others later associated with him in antislavery circles and publicly supported his efforts to protect the Mormons.³⁰ Kane’s agitation against capital punishment also illustrated his penchant for mixing personal and humanitarian motivations. In 1846, while at the Mormon camps, he instructed his parents, “If you haven’t resigned my place with the Anti-Capital P. men, keep it for me, as my life whether of one kind or another must begin when I get into Philadelphia.”³¹ Genuine reform sentiment and personal ambition were not mutually exclusive. No additional evidence, however, suggests further involvement by Kane. Likewise, the entire movement faded

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over the next decade. Legislative successes in a few states—Michigan, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin abolished capital punishment in the late 1840s and early 1850s—ironically coincided with a weakening of the broader campaign. Perhaps through his involvement with the movement against capital punishment, Kane became intrigued with peace reform. Anti-gallows reformers often linked capital punishment to other forms of violence, including (in the words of Greeley) to “wars, dueling, and all the other evils with which the earth is afflicted.” Peace societies first sprouted in the United States in the aftermath of the divisive War of 1812, and local associations united in 1828 to form the American Peace Society. Peace advocates enumerated a variety of positions on war, ranging from just war theory to absolute pacifism. The national society split in the late 1830s, when the more radical activists, associated with the Garrisonian abolitionists, repudiated defensive wars, self-defense, and involvement in coercive governments. During the 1840s, when Kane became aware of the movement, two main factions represented the peace crusade. The American Peace Society allowed a wider spectrum of belief (including conservative reformers who justified defensive wars), had its roots in evangelical reform, and envisioned the end of war as paving the way to the Millennium. The more radical Garrisonians promulgated their pacifism through the New England Non-Resistance Society.³² Kane’s exact location within the movement is difficult to discern. Elizabeth only noted that he agitated “Against Wars,” but he probably could not have been comfortable in either the American Peace Society, with its heavily evangelical aura, or with the Garrisonians, as his later antislavery activities revealed his differences with them. In addition, Kane enlisted as a private in the Pennsylvania militia in 1844, joining a company whose roster read like a who’s who of the children of Philadelphia’s elite. In January 1846, Governor Shunk commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel in the state militia. Kane apparently served in this capacity as an aide to Shunk, but the commission was also a transparent political favor extended by Shunk to his attorney general.³³ The peace advocacy of John L. O’Sullivan, a New York editor now best known for coining the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” is instructive for understanding Kane’s views. Active in both the anti-gallows and antiwar campaigns, the Democrat O’Sullivan viewed peace reform through a “romantic conception of democracy” as an “unstoppable force” that would peacefully sweep over the globe from the United States. Reformers from the American Peace Society and the Garrisonian nonresistants found common cause in loudly protesting the MexicanAmerican War. By contrast, O’Sullivan reconciled himself to the war as a means

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for the spread of democracy against tyrannical Mexico. Kane also approved of the war with Mexico. In December 1846, John bemusedly wrote Elisha, “Would you ever believe it, your philanthropist—philosopher—anti war—anti capital punishment brother, who denies the right of man to take life even for crime, Tom, even Tom Kane, is rabid for a chance of shooting Mexicans.” His military service and support for the Mexican-American War suggest his affinities with conservative peace reformers and romantics like O’Sullivan who saw the Mexican-American War as essential to the global spread of liberty.³⁴ In late 1846, Kane became swept up in the war fervor and jockeyed for an army commission. He first tried to enlist as a third lieutenant “of a company of rowdy volunteers,” but John intervened to stop those plans. Thomas, his father groaned, was willing to “take some vagrant commission in the Regular Army, which may kill him with ennui and camp duty” even though his father had recently offered him a plush judicial clerkship (in June 1846, John was appointed a federal district judge, fulfilling his son’s prediction); “I fear he will grasp at something more exciting and vastly more laborious and much worse paid.” The clerkship, he believed, would much better suit Thomas, giving him “pleasure in abundance, and all facilities for literary toil: and I really believe, if he can make himself happy in any train of pursuit whatever, it must be that of the pen.”³⁵ Thomas, however, felt the lure of romantic adventures in the West and desired a life of action and distinction. Even with his misgivings, John consented to allow Thomas to lobby for a staff officer’s commission and used his own political connections to advance his son’s prospects. Thomas secured recommendations to Polk from Michigan senator Lewis Cass (one of his father’s allies), most of the Pennsylvania congressional delegation, and fifty-five Democratic members of the Pennsylvania state legislature. Following a trip to Washington in late December, Thomas believed that he had “laid the foundation . . . for a prospective commission.” He quickly became ambivalent about his prospects for a military commission, however, and began to subtly work against his own appointment, intentionally not correcting “an apprehension prevalent that I did not want to be commissioned.” Rather, Thomas was hatching a new plan: he would accept his father’s clerkship and provide money for Elisha to establish himself as a Philadelphia physician. As John explained to Elisha, “Tom has no exclusive identity when you are in the case.”³⁶ Thomas’s lack of “exclusive identity” from his brother marked this era of his life. As he embarked upon his forays into reform and a professional career, he repeatedly urged Elisha to abandon his far-flung travels so they could form a partnership. Elisha’s refusal to do so drove Thomas to an even stronger devotion

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to reform. After his graduation from medical school in 1842, Elisha spent almost two years navigating the globe, first as an assistant naval surgeon on an U.S. delegation to China, then as a freelance wanderer in the Philippines, Singapore, India, Egypt, Greece, Switzerland, and France. Elisha hungered for adventure and regaled his family upon his return with tales of descending into volcanic craters and scaling Egyptian ruins. From May 1846 to early 1847, Elisha served on a naval cruise of the African coast. That November, he obtained an appointment to travel to Mexico as an official messenger from Polk to General Winfield Scott and Nicholas P. Trist, who had been charged with negotiating an end to the Mexican-American War. Following a series of adventures, including a battle in which he demonstrated his chivalry by saving the life of a young Mexican aristocrat, he arrived home in early 1848. He spent much of the next two years on a voyage to the Mediterranean and a surveying expedition along the southern coast. Finally, Elisha left in May 1850 on the celebrated official U.S. expedition to search for the British explorer Sir John Franklin, who had become lost in the Arctic. Meanwhile, except for his excursion to the Mormon camps, short vacations, travel related to reform, and a brief (and failed) affiliation with a coastsurveying camp in Massachusetts, Thomas remained in Philadelphia.³⁷ While Elisha sailed around the globe, Thomas laid extensive plans for a family partnership that would vault the brothers (including Pat)—and the entire family—into higher levels of social prominence. He thought if “we three brothers were all at the same time exercising our professions together in the same place, assisting one another as any three men of position can,” their prospects would be brilliant. While his legal apprenticeship had stalled in the early 1840s (in 1844, Thomas complained, “I find myself just where I started . . . in the first Book of Blackstone”), he promised to prepare for their partnership. He boasted, “With brass, perseverance, a bottom not afraid of seeming cemented to the office chair, and health, much may be done.” By December 1844, Thomas told Elisha, he had “applied the nose to the grindstone” and was “just through Blackstone.” Nor would he languish in obscurity: “I am going to canvass friends. I am going to study . . . I am going to work—work gratis for the name of the thing, if I can’t get work for money. . . . Thus, it is my hopeful delusion to have in two or three years a circle of acquaintances in which to move with you . . . and to have in five or six income enough to support us two bachelors in comfortable style. Such are my dreams, my schemes, my purposes.” John confirmed Thomas’s progress to Elisha, describing him as a “hard student, member of a debating society, soldier, and social companion, with decidedly better health than he has had for five years, and with good promise of professional eminence.” Thomas was admitted to the Philadelphia bar in March 1846.³⁸

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FIGURE 4. Elisha Kane in his naval uniform. (Reproduced by permission from the American Philosophical Society.)

As he proposed various schemes for their partnership, Thomas exuded a high confidence in his and Elisha’s abilities: “We both are proud, detesting vulgarity, fit to start in high places and intriguers. . . . Are we not able to push our way better than the dull driven cattle of the common herd?” “A couple of winters would see us at the head of Society,” he thought. On his clerkship salary, Thomas and Elisha could live “magnificently,” “pay Mama for board,” purchase a “cabriolet of some dash and the furniture of our two offices with all our etceteras.” As part

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of his plan, Thomas instructed Elisha of his duty to marry to “keep up our family name” and he pledged to fund Elisha’s courtship endeavors (though he gave few indications of considering marriage for himself ).³⁹ As in his reform efforts, behind-the-scenes writing and promotion formed a crucial part of Thomas’s envisioned partnership. With Thomas’s assistance, Elisha could “write a really good book of travels—tell some really marvelous stories of Medical Experience,” and then “easily be puffed enough” to be the “first Ceasar of the Village.” He assured Elisha, “You can combine talent, navy influence, social influence, journalist influence—with political influence.” Thomas bragged, “I have the Press here, and Father can lead the party.” In 1848, Thomas placed articles in Philadelphia papers about Elisha’s Mexican exploits, ensuring that he returned home to accolades. Since a gentleman had to delicately balance the need to promote himself without giving the appearance of actively doing so, Thomas had left “no trace of me or my hands.” Pleased with his success, Thomas longed to “have a paper [of ] my own . . . to help myself my friends [and] the dear good cause.” The “dear good cause” presumably combined the promotion of the Kane family with Thomas’s own reform ideals.⁴⁰ Besides an economic partnership, Thomas desired a tight emotional bond between the brothers. He promised to tell Elisha the “confidential truth from the heart” and carefully guard his secrets. They could thus “keep up our brotherhood for ten years, and thus only.” Their close brotherly bond, revealed in their joint plans and affectionate letters, reflected a broader pattern among young American men of the era. Expected to establish themselves in a career before marriage, young upper- and middle-class men often formed such deep relationships. Intimate friendships generally included living together, sharing resources, sometimes forming business partnerships, and providing emotional support. Even with Elisha’s absences, their relationship provided crucial support for both brothers as they entered manhood. Elisha, however, kept secrets from Thomas. When he needed help in covering up an unintended pregnancy with a lowerclass Philadelphia woman in 1846, Elisha turned not to Thomas, but to Pat, rationalizing that he did so not “from a want of trust, love, or respect, to Father or Tom, but simply from a wish to spare them pain.” Some years later, when Elisha engaged in yet another furtive and socially disapproved relationship—this time with the controversial spiritualist Margaret Fox—he again asked Pat rather than Thomas to help him cover up the liaison.⁴¹ Thomas recognized that persuading Elisha, with his profound wanderlust, to settle in staid Philadelphia would be difficult, and he marshaled several additional arguments to encourage Elisha to accept his proposal. Believing that their father had neglected to prepare their younger siblings to enter proper society,

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Thomas grumbled about his self-imposed responsibility to introduce them “into the world,” and he urged Elisha to shoulder his share of the burden. Thomas painted a dismal picture of what would happen to the Kane family should he leave: Mother would be “abandoned to . . . Presbyterian asceticism,” the younger boys to “Free Schoolism” and professional stagnation, and Bessie to an unsuitable marriage. “No! Here is my post,” he declared, “and here I mount guard.” In addition, Thomas promised Elisha in 1844 that their family life had improved, as there were less “outpourings of the family temper” (though later that year he invited Elisha to take his place “as lightning rod to carry off the electric shocks of the progenitors”). Thomas also repeatedly assured Elisha of his own health. In 1844, he wrote that the “Doctordom” agreed that he had “considerable stamina” and that he weighed “98 pounds instead of the 74 my highest qualification last summer.”⁴² Thomas chafed at remaining home while Elisha explored the world and resented his continued delays. “I loathe Philadelphia,” he groaned. “I think I have not one heart, joyous, or affectionate connection to bind me to its redbrick prison walls.” Thomas accused Elisha of an “Anti Home resolve,” writing, “I do not know [what] breezes, paseos and muchachas there may be in it to console for deprivation of Philadelphia redbrick & green window shutters, Quaker formalities, half cut provincialisms and Puritan forced values, and above all its hard labour at solitary confinement.” Indeed, he continually grumbled about Philadelphia’s provincialism (perhaps not the best strategy to persuade Elisha). Following his “first experience of a Philadelphia soiree,” he described the women as “thin, scraggy, bad teethed, bad breathed some, and generally bearing signs of frail health” with “very shapeless” breasts. Furthermore, “they were generally voracious and gross feeders.” The men were no better: “Bad dressers and bad talkers: they are totally ignorant of what a ‘woman’ means and to crown all, are generally very awkward and very ugly. I am pleased to see them so vulgar & provincial—on my account—and yours—if you shall soon be with us.” In his condemnations, Thomas sounded like other young Americans who had returned from European voyages.⁴³ In 1849, Thomas and Elisha made some moves to realize the long-envisioned partnership by renting, along with Pat, two furnished parlors in Philadelphia for joint offices and a residence. A few months later, Elisha had already left on another voyage. Though the plans for partnership ultimately failed, the pull of his charismatic older brother exerted an enormous influence on Thomas. Attracted to the absent Elisha, he promised to do anything—from contributing half of his own salary to assiduous promotion of his brother—to persuade Elisha to remain close at hand. In 1846, Thomas plaintively described his dreams with Elisha as his

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“sole sustenance through my present hardship & privation” and pleaded, “You must not disappoint me.” Elisha, however, repeatedly disappointed Thomas’s schemes. At one point, Thomas told Elisha, “That same craving after excitement which has kept us rolling without moss . . . has at least saved us from insignificance.”⁴⁴ Unable to persuade Elisha, Thomas chose another outlet for his own “craving after excitement” than their envisioned partnership. While Elisha navigated the globe and began his celebrated rise to fame as an Arctic explorer, Thomas immersed himself more deeply into the culture of anti-evangelical, Democratic, romantic reform. In the mid-1840s he took up the two causes that dominated the rest of his life: protection of the Mormons and antislavery.

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Meeting the Mormons

On May 13, 1846, the day the United States declared war on Mexico, Kane entered a conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Philadelphia to hear the preaching of Jesse C. Little, a merchant and the head of the church in the eastern states. Kane, then twenty-four, had not merely stumbled upon the meeting; he had evidently encountered the Mormons through print (and possibly on the Philadelphia streets) and decided that a relationship with the Latter-day Saints could be mutually advantageous. Over the next few weeks, as he advanced his plans, war fever swept the nation, reaching a crescendo after official word reached Washington on May 25 of General Zachary Taylor’s impressive victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma in early May. Taylor’s success seemingly promised a short and heroic war, and young men of Kane’s generation rushed to join the military, quickly overwhelming recruiting quotas. Later that fall, Kane would also dream of romantic adventures in Mexico. For the moment, however, he set his sights on the Mormon refugee camps in the Midwest.¹ The mid-1840s were a particularly promising moment for a would-be humanitarian with a streak of iconoclasm to read of the Mormons. From the time Joseph Smith began the movement in 1830, the new religion had proved tumultuous. Mormonism’s critique of contemporary Christianity and American culture and its unorthodox doctrines and practices—in particular, the “gathering” of Latterday Saints into a few communities to build their Zion—led to clashes, sometimes violent, with their neighbors. In the 1830s, Mormon attempts to establish settlements in Missouri had failed twice when suspicious Missourians forced them from the state. The main Latter-day Saint community in Kirtland, Ohio, disintegrated in the late 1830s from internal conflict and external pressures. For

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a time in the early 1840s, the Mormons found peace in their burgeoning city of Nauvoo, Illinois. However, just as in Missouri and Ohio, perceptions of Mormon practices—including the mixing of church and state, bloc voting, and rumors of secret rituals and plural wives—created conflict with older settlers. The mob murder of Smith and his brother Hyrum in 1844, and the subsequent expulsion of the Saints from Nauvoo in early 1846, forced the Saints to seek refuge in the Far West. By December 1846, almost twelve thousand Mormons had left Nauvoo and were strung out in makeshift communities on the plains of Iowa and Nebraska, with a slight majority in the vicinity of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Winter Quarters, Nebraska. The Mormon refugee camps—lacking adequate supplies, subject to epidemic disease, and plagued by fears of future persecution—presented a humanitarian crisis that piqued Kane’s sensibilities.² Accordingly, he formed a scheme that mixed personal ambition and humanitarian sentiment. Kane’s selection of the defense of the religious liberty of the Mormons as an appropriate object of reform grew out of both his anti-evangelicalism and the antebellum Democratic Party’s pluralistic vision and emphasis on liberty. Travel to the Mormon camps also allowed Kane to act the part of a romantic hero, who took decisive action and underwent danger on behalf of the oppressed. After the conference in Philadelphia, Kane approached Little and declared his intention of accompanying the Saints to California. The interest of the young, but wealthy and politically connected, Kane intrigued Little, who had been charged by Smith’s successor Brigham Young to raise funds for the emigrating Saints (possibly through an agreement with the government). Kane invited Little home, where their conversation was “very agreeable and so lengthy” that Little missed the evening meeting of the conference where he was scheduled to deliver a sermon. Securing the friendship of such a potential ally easily took precedence over preaching to the already committed. Over the next week, Little and Kane met repeatedly, with Little speaking of the “work of God, and upon the subject of emigration.” In turn, Kane shared information regarding U.S. politics and territorial ambitions on California and offered to aid Little in securing government appropriations. Little and other Mormon leaders initially distrusted Kane, but with a “little tact and patience and a little manoeuvring,” he quickly convinced them of his genuine interest. He likewise trusted the Saints, telling Elisha that Little “plays me sincerely and so indeed do the rest” (though he retained personal reservations about Little, who “rules all the church East of the Mississippi with despotic sway”). Little encouraged Kane to travel to the camps and provided him with “letters of genuine strength . . . [and] to the great men too—to Brigham Young and Orson Hyde and the other notabilities.”³

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Kane undoubtedly boasted to Little of his family’s close connections with the Polk administration, and he gave him a letter of introduction to Vice President George Dallas. Little had shown Kane an offer of assistance to the Saints from the British Hudson’s Bay Company, which probably suggested to Kane a negotiating ploy. In his letter to Dallas, Kane’s assurances of Mormon loyalty—they “still retain American hearts, and would not, willingly, sell themselves to the foreigner”—contained the implicit threat of the possibility of Mormon collaboration with foreign governments. In the context of the beginning of the war and the unsettled American claims to much of the West, both Kane and Little recognized (and repeatedly employed) the persuasive power of subtly warning of the potential for Mormon disloyalty.⁴ Armed with this letter and strategic plan, Little left for Washington, and Kane prepared to journey to the Mormon refugee camps. He exchanged a flurry of letters with Elisha, then in Massachusetts preparing to leave on a naval voyage to the West African coast, that reveal his complex mix of philanthropic and selfinterested motivations. In short, he hoped “to help the poor Mormons to my utmost, principally—but also to help myself if I see anything outstanding.”⁵ Kane believed that time in the Mormon camps would enable him to write a book beneficial to both himself and the Mormons. His writing talents could vault him into public prominence and establish his reputation as a man of culture and reform. He had promised to assist Elisha in the composition of a travel narrative of his sea voyages, and spending time with the Mormons would expose Thomas to “much of queer life, yankee & fanatic” and, like his brother, give him adventures worthy to publish. Ambition joined with humanitarianism, as he aimed to write “a little book that would pay, besides do right to what I am high convinced are a wronged tribe of men.” Kane contacted a Philadelphia publishing firm, Carey and Hart, which encouragingly promised him “famous success” but declined to give him an advance to fund his journey. Little likewise recognized that Kane’s literary ambition could potentially help alter the highly negative portraits of Mormonism in the press. Both Kane and the Mormons viewed their nascent relationship as symbiotic, as the Saints hoped he would “do them justice and tell the world on my return, that they are what I found them, & not drunkards, horse thieves or adulterers as reputed.”⁶ Kane also believed that adventure would prove a boon to his perpetually fragile physical and emotional health. He complained to Elisha, “I am growing thinner daily . . . I am unhappy in mind.” Elisha worried Thomas had begun to suffer from a “caving in sense of worthlessness.” Indeed, he declared (in a tone not likely to cure his brother’s depression): “You are nearly laid up and be it Mexico or Mormonism the body Slave holds you in his grip—You can do neither.”

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Thomas, however, promised Elisha that an arduous journey would transform him into a “man again of health & heart and strength.” He correctly recognized that strenuous travel and a sense of mission (and danger) could invigorate his health, a pattern continually repeated in his life. In this respect, he resembled Elisha, who on his first Arctic voyage told Thomas, “I have a delightful scent of danger to keep me up—and you know that such stimulus is not uncongenial.”⁷ Furthermore, Kane viewed an expedition with the Mormons as a means to reach California and be on the ground if Californians revolted against Mexican rule, as seemed likely. Fueled by his father’s political connections, he dreamed large. News of the Mexican-American War would likely spark a revolution in California, Kane reasoned, and he could help fill the void in American leadership: “At one time or other a government representative may be wanting. Who so fit for one as I?—above all if on the journey I shall have ingratiated myself with the disaffected Mormon army.” His father could easily obtain for him “some sort of government agency of Polk,” perhaps even as the first American governor of California, if he “would only work for it”; besides advancing his career, an official position “would sell for me a thousand dollars worth of my book.”⁸ A sense of American nationalism and Manifest Destiny also influenced Kane. The Mormons’ loyalty to the federal government, especially given their latest expulsion and large numbers of English converts, seemed tenuous at best. To Elisha, Thomas confided that his sense of “duty” to travel to the camps “increased as I began to see signs of . . . English tampering with their leaders,” presumably a reference to the supposed interest of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Mormons.⁹ Kane’s use of the threat of Mormon disloyalty was thus not solely a ruse to secure Latter-day Saint goals in Washington. Rather, he initially retained his own doubts about Mormon patriotism and hoped such a threat could be employed to gain government assistance to the Saints, which would then nullify any possibility of Mormon collusion with foreign powers. Kane’s intentions to journey to the Mormon camps sent his family into a panic. His father worried to Elisha, “He has a project of his own, not probably well defined in his own mind, and certainly not developed to me, of joining the Mormon Emigrants for California.” Having received “erratic” advice from the “Yankee tavern keeper” Little, “poor Tom is at this moment controuled.” John saw only potential ruin in associating with such a disreputable cause. “The case has no bright side,” he lamented, as Thomas “is about to deal a blow to his own character as a right minded man, which he will feel through life.” John had already prepared a relaxing summer health trip for his son to visit relatives in New York. He groaned, “Why then tempt a long, dangerous, poverty-cursed expedition, of six or nine months, in society, which is made up of families at the best,

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with an acknowledged large intermixture of the dishonest and the vile!” Indeed, he considered it the “veriest hallucination that ever afflicted an educated mind. It bows me in sorrow. All but this I could bear.”¹⁰ John tried to use the excitement over the war with Mexico to divert Thomas’s attention, encouraging him to join the Pennsylvania militia so he could be stationed at Fort Mifflin near Philadelphia. A stint in the military could provide the benefits of the Mormon journey—“exercise, open air, coarse diet”—without the risks. Thomas dismissed the military plan, claiming that he would “get better for a week or ten days on another excursion, but he would be sure to break off & come home for work as soon as he should begin to mend.” His Mormon scheme, by contrast, “would bind him to go on. . . . This is in his view the merit of the scheme: he cannot trust himself: he must be locked up in the railroad car for fear he should jump out.” John sighed in exasperation, “Was there ever such blindness of judgment?” Jane, meanwhile, supported Thomas’s plan to go West, suggesting he “join some of the Fremonts expeditions or emigration parties to Oregon” or the “Nauvoo travellers.”¹¹ Pat agreed with his father’s evaluation, disparaging Thomas’s idea as the “damndest foolish” notion. Though he praised Thomas’s plan to write “about the Mormons & Indians upon his return,” Pat also suspected that Thomas hoped his threats to go on the Mormon trip “will incite us to offer an extensive travel as an inducement for him to give it up.” Indeed, John and Pat planned a series of alternative trips for Thomas, but he consistently rebuffed their efforts. Finally, Pat obliquely referred to another family concern, raising the possibility that his brother would go to the Mormon camps as either “Lieutenant or elder Kane.” Whether or not the Kanes feared that Thomas might actually convert, they envisioned nothing productive from his association with Mormonism. After their initial reaction, Thomas refused to discuss his plans with his family, and Pat further lambasted him for “worrying poor Father to death. Were he not so unwell I should say his behaviour was contemptible & unworthy of a gentleman.”¹² Unlike John and Pat, Elisha did not consider Thomas’s plan “madness.” In his view, Thomas—“the brightest and in my opinion the best of our family”—faced three alternatives: death, the improvement of his health, or to continue “erratic and impracticable.” A “long tramp . . . in accordance with his inclination” offered him the best chance to recover his health. A healthy Thomas, Elisha told Pat, “will be the controuling influence of you and myself ” and be “a very, very valuable brother—he is a noble fellow and in ability worth our entire batch.” He continued, “Tom must be well to give us his fundamental assistance. I want him to write a book for me. I want him to puff me in the papers.”¹³ While the Kanes fretted, Jesse Little had proceeded on to Washington, arriving

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on May 21. Besides Kane’s letter to Dallas, Little carried letters of introduction from New Hampshire governor John H. Steele to various government insiders, including Amos Kendall, a well-connected Democrat who had reputedly served as the brains behind Andrew Jackson’s presidency. Kendall had already sought to represent Latter-day Saint interests in Washington to further his own business schemes. The Mexican-American War, Kendall advised Little, could be used to garner government support for the Saints’ emigration by enlisting Mormon soldiers and “establishing them in California to defend the country.” On May 26, Kendall told Little that he had presented the Mormon case to President Polk, “who had determined to take possession of California” and to possibly employ two thousand Mormon solders to “push through and fortify the country.”¹⁴ In late May, Kane followed Little to Washington to “see if he could ‘do any thing for the persecuted Mormons.’” Upon his arrival, Dallas provided him with a letter requesting a private meeting with Polk, which along with John’s relationship with Polk opened the White House doors for Thomas. In a forty-minute meeting, Thomas pressed the president to use Mormon troops and to endorse his own mission to the Saints. To persuade Polk, he boasted of his “own peculiar position and means of influence” with the Saints and played his most effective card, the threat of “English tampering” with the Mormons. Unconvinced, Polk responded that he lacked authority to give Kane “any official power” but suggested that the involvement of a “disinterested American citizen . . . would be one of the highest and most praiseworthy patriotism.” Polk further intimated he could not provide Kane with government funds, a comment that Kane interpreted as an affront to his personal honor since he perceived his mission as a “highly unselfish errand.” According to Kane, his brusque response cowed Polk, who was even “smaller than I in the physique.” When Polk emphasized that he spoke in his capacity as president, Kane replied in the language of honor, “but not the less by one gentleman to another.” Though one suspects bravado between brothers, Kane confided to Elisha his little confidence in Polk and wrote, “we two must not be meek and lowly if we seek to inherit this earth.” After the minor confrontation, Thomas reported, “the artificial manner was dropped on his part and the measured on mine.” The next morning, Kane returned to Polk’s office with Michigan senator Lewis Cass, and Polk instructed the State Department to draft a letter endorsing Kane’s efforts.¹⁵ After this meeting, Kane returned to Philadelphia and Little continued lobbying in Washington. Little and Kane were operating at a fortunate time. On May 29, Polk concluded to “dispatch an expedition to California,” contingent only on whether or not a force from the “Western frontier of Missouri” (conveniently close to the Mormon camps) could reach the Sacramento River before

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winter. The following day, Polk’s cabinet endorsed his suggestion that Colonel Stephen W. Kearny take his regiment plus an additional “1000 mounted Volunteers” from Missouri and march for Santa Fe, and then, if possible, continue on to California. On June 1, Little wrote directly to Polk to offer the service of Mormon troops. He described the Saints as “true hearted Americans” but again raised the possibility of a Mormon alliance with another nation: “We would disdain to receive assistance from a foreign power—although it should be proferred—unless our government shall turn us off in this great crisis.”¹⁶ The Mormons presented a challenging problem for Polk. In January, after Illinois officials notified him of the Mormons’ intended emigration, Polk told them he had “no power to prevent or check” their movements. He further refused to interfere in the Mormons’ religion, “however absurd it might be considered to be,” pointing out “if I could interfere with the Mormons, I could with the Baptists, or any other religious sect.” The transformation of the Saints into a foreign policy threat, however, forced Polk to take actions to retain their loyalty.¹⁷ At a cabinet meeting on June 2, Polk definitively decided to send Kearny’s “expedition against California,” which would include “as volunteers a few hundred of the Mormons.” Three days later, Polk informed Little and Kendall that a battalion of Mormons would be raised once the Saints arrived in California. Little pressed Polk to immediately enlist the Saints, but the president refused. After Little left, Polk shared with Kendall details that he had not thought “safe to communicate to Mr. Little.” Rumors had already reached California, Polk told Kendall, that a “large body of mormons were emigrating to the country,” which had “alarmed” the local settlers; Polk knew “this alarm would be increased if the first organized troops of the U.S. that entered the country were mormons.” Thus, the Mormons would not exceed one-fourth of Kearny’s troops and would be enlisted in California. The lobbying of Kane, Little, and Kendall proved crucial in convincing Polk of the need to “conciliate them [the Mormons], attach them to our country, & prevent them from taking part against us.”¹⁸ Mormon debate over Polk’s motivations swirled for decades. Kane later believed that Polk had been moved by neither “sympathy” nor “malignity,” though one unnamed cabinet member had been “wolfish” toward the Mormons. This latter suspicion, in exaggerated form, quickly became part of Mormon mythology. In 1847, shortly after the arrival of the pioneer company of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young gave a sermon that “damned President Polk” and accused him of hatching a plot, along with influential Missouri senator Thomas H. Benton, to destroy the Saints by forcing them to raise the battalion. If the Saints refused, Young claimed, “Missouri was ready with 3000 men” to destroy the Mormon community. In 1856, Jedediah M. Grant, Young’s coun-

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selor, credited this accusation to Kane. According to Grant, Kane had told him that Benton “wanted to take troops and pounce upon your wives and children when upon the banks of the Missouri river, and sweep them out of existence.” In this telling, only the Saints’ demonstration of patriotism by enlisting in the Mormon Battalion prevented “a horrible massacre.” While no contemporary evidence suggests such a plot, the myth became deeply ingrained in nineteenthcentury Mormon cultural memory; a church leader told Kane in 1881 that “hundreds of addresses, delivered from the time of the enlistment until the present” had portrayed the government’s actions as “heartless and cruel.”¹⁹ At the time, however, both Mormon leaders and Kane lobbied for and welcomed Polk’s decision to enlist Mormon troops. During the week of Polk’s decision, Kane, stricken with ill health that he believed life-threatening, remained in Philadelphia. “If my aspirations for the good of your injured community, are destined to be thus cast down,” he fatalistically sighed to Little, “you must still remember me as one who would have been, had such been the will of Providence, your friend to serve you.” In response, Little dramatically promised him divine healing: “get up from Your Couch & Your Pains shall Leave You—this is Your Blessing if you will receive it.” Upon receiving Little’s letter, Kane, over the objections of his family and doctor, returned to Washington on June 7, feeling “better than when he left home.” Little wrote in his diary, “From some cause he feels very much interested in behalf of our people.”²⁰ In Washington, Kane met with Little and Kendall, as well as with Polk, Dallas, Secretary of State James Buchanan, and Secretary of War William Marcy, who had already sent orders to Kearny to raise the battalion. Marcy’s orders, however, were ambiguous on a central point: whether to enlist Mormons before or after they arrived in California. Whether Polk and Marcy had changed their minds as to where to enlist the Mormon soldiers, or they had simply written an unclear letter, Kearny decided to raise the troops immediately. Believing that Kane would travel with the Mormons to California, Polk and Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft (another of his father’s acquaintances) made Kane “the bearer of dispatches to our squadron in the Pacific.” As such, Polk gave Kane a letter instructing “officers of the United States” to give him “all the aid and facilities in accomplishing the objects of [his] journey.”²¹ The Kane family was much on the mind of Polk that week. The day before writing Thomas’s letter, Polk nominated John Kane as U.S. district judge for the eastern district of Pennsylvania. The Senate quickly and overwhelmingly confirmed John to the lifetime appointment. Soon after Thomas’s departure for the Mormon camps, John dangled a bright possibility before his son. He would not

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remove the current clerk until his son’s return, “so as in case of emergency to give it to you. It is said that the clerkship is worth more than the judgeship.” (John estimated the judgeship as worth twenty-five hundred dollars a year in salary and “patronage of three times as much.”)²² Thomas’s success in Washington gradually won his family over to his viewpoint. John wrote to Elisha that Thomas had secured “full credentials of the highest and most confidential sort” from Polk and Bancroft, letters of support (in English, Latin, and Spanish) from the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, and letters of credit. According to John, Thomas intended to “join the emigrants of whom he had become the champion, and to guide them (Colt’s revolver’s in each hand) to the promised land as good dependents on the old Thirteen States.” John also described the transformation of his own views: “Wild at first, the project became by degree so well considered, that I joined in it heart and soul, not however, until thanks to Thomas’s indomitable energies, he had enlisted Presdt., Cabinet, & congressmen, heartily on his side. If he lives, he is on the way to usefulness and bright honours.”²³ Correspondence with friends in Washington had also convinced John of the political wisdom of his son’s decision. Politicians faced a vacuum of reliable information about the Saints—portrayals were “on the one side so obviously prejudiced and on the other so partial”—and they wanted “definite information of the character of the leading Mormons.” Current conventional wisdom sympathized with the Saints, admitted that they had been unlawfully driven from their homes, and supported actions to protect them from future aggression. Thus, if Thomas should be satisfied of the Mormons’ continued loyalty to the nation, he could tell the Saints that “they will carry with them the sympathies of their countrymen, and the guarantee of National Faith for their future repose.” In addition, Thomas would almost certainly “find California in undisputed American possession” and could thus assist in ensuring “security of conscience and equality of rights to all who may deserve them.” John assured his son that he went with Polk’s “absolute confidence” and his actions could “be the means of doing a great good” for both the Saints and the nation, “for it is a good to the country as well as to the Mormons, to bind them together by a sense of mutual benefits.” Thomas’s foolish wanderings had been transformed into a “manly and patriotic errand.”²⁴ On June 9, Little and Kane returned to Philadelphia, and three days later they started for the West by rail, arriving in St. Louis on June 21, “sleepy, tired, bored & very well in health.” The following day, they separated, with both headed for the Mormon camps, Kane via Fort Leavenworth and Little via Nauvoo. Just as

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Kane had provided Little with crucial letters of introduction, Little now gave him more letters to key Mormon leaders. Little cast Kane into the role in which he imagined himself, calling him “a friend to the poor & oppressed” and extolling him for leaving the “many comforts of a Fathers House for the sole purpose of doing us good by correcting the many false reports concerning us & of extending a mighty influence in our behalf to the Executive of the United States.”²⁵ Little’s letters smoothed over his own difficulties with Kane as well as Kane’s thoughts of abandoning his plan to travel to the Mormon camps. Kane feared that the Mormons might delay their emigration; if he waited, he could lose his own opportunity to accompany Kearny’s troops to California. Furthermore, while at St. Louis, Little and Kane were confronted by negative reports on the Saints and they “quarreled.” In his recounting, Little won the argument and Kane “apologized by presenting with a gold pen & case.” After leaving St. Louis, Kane complained that unnamed “disappointments” had immediately worsened his health. While his voyage to St. Louis had given him renewed vigor—“I weighed no less than 93 1⁄2 pounds, and was strong for every purpose”—it now pained him “to keep my back upright—to walk across the cabin is an effort that makes asthmatic.” Kane wrote his family that he faced a crucial decision, whether to continue to the Mormon camps or join Kearny’s troops on their march to Santa Fe and “thence westwardly to march for the Sacramento Valley, to intercept the comers into California.” He decided to travel by steamboat up the Missouri River to Fort Leavenworth “for a confidential talk with Kearney.” In his journal (which may have doubled as an initial draft of a travel narrative), Kane waxed poetic, as did other romantics, about the inspiring effects of the western landscape: “I am calmed and elevated in dignity of feeling, my philosophy is ennobled, by constant commune with the spirit of the microcosm of the American world through which I move. . . . I shall carry with me the tide of civilization—of 19th century civilization up to the walls of Ft. Leavenworth.”²⁶ Even with Kane’s bequest of civilization, Fort Leavenworth held only despair for him. By the time he arrived on June 28, Kearny had received his orders and was rapidly assembling his Army of the West. The procurement of necessary supplies, combined with the hundreds of raw recruits, rendered the fort chaotic. While there, Kane received the devastating news that the main body of Mormons did not intend to proceed to California that year. To his father, he despaired, “Adieu, book, honour, money—everything I hoped.” Slipping into depression, he feared returning “the same worthless invalid I have been—but in debt.” Undecided about his next step, he speculated, “I may go as far as Santa Fe, or I may go to join the Mormon camp—but I shall most likely return home.”

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Nevertheless, after Kearny doused Kane’s idea to overtake the “rearmost party of California emigrants between this place and Fort Laramie,” Kane returned the dispatches entrusted to him by Polk and Bancroft and set his sights irretrievably upon the Mormon camps.²⁷ Kearny brightened Kane’s prospects by offering him a post as an officer in the Mormon Battalion. Captain James Allen had already left for the Mormon camps to begin the recruitment, and Kane would need to quickly follow to secure his commission. Eager to arrive in time, he left the following day, the “hottest of the summer yet.” After pushing until his “poor animal gave out,” Kane arrived in St. Joseph, Missouri, with broken health himself, forcing him to take a steamboat back to Fort Leavenworth. The loss of the “pleasant prospect” of a military commission crushed Kane’s spirits: “I wonder I am so little tempted to suicide. God save me.” With his path toward “selfish aggrandizement” foiled, he proclaimed his renewed determination to accomplish his “unselfish objects,” the raising of the battalion and securing Mormon loyalty to the nation. Nevertheless, Kane bemoaned the fact that “Captain Allen takes all credit of raising the regiment I should have shared with him . . . I gain no fame or fortune by my book. Still less shall I ever be the man of the Western West.” As consolation, he told his parents he still hoped to gain “vigour enough to work for an honest living, and quiet nerves enough to be a comfort not an annoyance to you,” as well as their “praise for the unrewarded good I have done to my country and a persecuted people.”²⁸ At Fort Leavenworth, Kane received letters from home, including his father’s offer of the clerkship. He asked John to keep the clerkship open so he could accept it after he saw “that the Mormons are all right and make my report to Polk.” “Even if I find expedient to cavalier the Mormons to Laramie,” he wrote, “I can be returned by that time & Five Months of exercise life ought to rub out a good deal of chronic disease!” The welcome news of the clerkship also encouraged him to spend more liberally, as thoughts of a large income made him a “less ready submitter to the hardships” ahead. After thanking “Providence for the mercy of salt pork with corn bread and a place to throw down [my] blankets under a roof,” he dreamed of his parents’ “French cookeries—your fruits—your couches of fine linen . . . and your bath tubs.” To his sister Bessie, he contrasted his journey through searing heat and torrential rains to his pampered life at home: “You who saw me only study—leaving all responsibility upon servants, tailors and tradespeople . . . pleased to say that I could not tie a shoestring— would laugh to see me doing now all my own work of every sort.” After a few days of recuperation, Kane left for the Mormon camps by steamboat. He planned

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to travel to Council Bluffs, a “days ride from the place where this steamboat lands me,” and then continue on among the scattered camps to “find the Twelve [Apostles] and their center of action.”²⁹ Captain Allen’s arrival in the camps in late June had generated much controversy. At Mt. Pisgah, Iowa, where Allen first recruited troops, Apostle Wilford Woodruff initially believed he and his men “to be spies & that the president had no hand in it.” After meeting with Allen, Brigham Young, president of the Twelve Apostles and leader of the Mormon emigration, realized that Little’s mission had succeeded and began a strong recruitment drive. To skeptical Saints, Young argued: “The U.S. want our friendship, the President wants to do us good, and secure our confidence. The outfit of these five hundred men costs us nothing, and their pay will be sufficient to take their families over the mountains.” Mormon leaders recognized the value of the Mormon Battalion; Apostle Heber C. Kimball considered it “one of the greatest blessings that the Great God of heaven ever did bestow upon the people.” Nevertheless, many rank-andfile Saints, those who would bear the burden of the battalion, suspected a government conspiracy to destroy the Saints (which Young and others would later draw upon to demonize Polk). One Mormon thought the federal government ordered the enlistment for “our destruction” and so that the wives and children of the soldiers would be “in an indian country left to mercies of the savage and the cravings of hunger.”³⁰ The strong endorsement of Mormon leaders did not immediately quell the Saints’ fears, though Little’s arrival on July 6 stamped out some of the rumors. On July 11, Kane arrived at an outlying Mormon camp and confirmed that Polk had “sent for 500 Mormon volunteers” and that the president “was very favorable to our people And had taken this course for our good.” Kane impressed Apostle Woodruff as “a Gentlemen” who showed “much interest in our welfare,” and his message convinced Woodruff that “God had began to move upon the heart of the President And others in this Nation.” Mormon Hosea Stout recorded that Kane “said that we had nothing to fear and all was right between us and the Government.” Suspicious of Kane’s claims, Stout only concluded two days later, after receiving further reassurances, that the battalion “was done as a special favor to us by the President” and “there was no trick in it.”³¹ On July 13, Kane arrived at Council Bluffs where he found Allen “fidgeting discouraged, vexed at being misunderstood—and declaring that if, within a time really too brief, the men were not raised, he would return without them— which only increased the distrust of the timorous.” “Within twenty minutes” of his arrival, Kane “held a council for three and a half hours” with Young and other Mormon leaders. Along with Allen, Kane then went to a “grand meeting

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of the people,” attended by one thousand Saints, at which Young used all of his considerable persuasive abilities to convince them of the necessity of the battalion. Conceding that it would be a heavy hardship, Young promised that the soldiers would receive divine protection—“All the fighting that will be done will be among yourselves”—and pledged that their families would be cared for. Referring to their previous persecutions, Young argued that in California the Saints would be the “first settlers,” so “if any man comes and says ‘get out,’ we will say ‘get out.’” The recruits “would never be sorry, but glad to all eternity.”³² After this meeting, Kane traveled with Mormon leaders to give speeches at outlying camps. Although he complained of a night without supper and with bedbugs, he nevertheless exulted in his “evening’s romance.” “After this two day efforts,” Kane boasted, “the matter was decided.” In his eyes, he played the crucial role in soothing the Saints’ anxieties: “I came in the nick of time. I spoke to those of influence and harangued the masses.” With Kane’s assistance, “the men were levied in a jiffy—married men left their wives & children & goods in charge of the church—and four hundred were raised without regard to sacrifice of feeling.” He concluded, “I feel it a personal triumph.”³³ On July 16, Woodruff glossed over the difficulties in recruiting the battalion and created an enduring Mormon myth (which Kane would later help reinforce): “When this 500 men were Called for they steped forth instantly at the Call of the President notwithstanding the Ill treatment & suffering we had endured in the Persecutions of the United States.” The battalion members “went away with Cheerful hearts Believing that they were doing the will of God.” Thus, the battalion left on what would become the longest infantry march in U.S. history, traveling through Santa Fe and on to California. Young proved correct that they would not face a battle. Their march became historic for other reasons as well: they surveyed the region along the U.S. southern border that later became the Gadsen Purchase; they helped establish the American presence in California; and, following their discharge, a number of former soldiers found themselves at Sutter’s Mill when James Marshall discovered gold. Furthermore, money from their salaries helped fund the Mormon emigration, and their service quieted talk of Mormon disloyalty.³⁴ Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, rumors swirled about Kane’s relationship with the Mormons. A correspondent wrote Kane that two stories circulated about him. The first, which “prevails among the lawyers and respectables,” asserted that Kane had “gone out as an agent of the Government and on honourable service.” The second, which held sway “among the fashionables,” accused Kane of converting to Mormonism. Rumors continued to dog the Kane family. In September, Pat tried to squelch gossip “concerning Tom’s entrance into the Mor-

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FIGURE 5. On July 29, 1846, Thomas Kane drew this sketch of the Mormon camp in his notebook: “My waggon—the first camp of the distant prairie of the Platte.” (MSS 792, Thomas L. Kane and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.)

mon priesthood.” Throughout Kane’s life (and even after), many incorrectly believed he had secretly converted and acted not as a reformer or philanthropist, but as a Mormon agent.³⁵ In the camps, the Mormons treated Kane both as their champion and as a curiosity. On July 20, Kane wrote Bessie, describing the surrounding woods as “full of soldiers—five hundred of them singing, praying, coffee grinding—wood chopping & god knows what else, within a circle of a hundred yards square of which I am in the center.” He was confined to a tent, as the Mormon soldiers “would give me no peace from their pleasant conversation for one instant, if I were to budge a step from where I am.” At least while he remained in the tent, “they think they must restrain their honest curiosity, and be content with standing in a ring around me and admiring my penmanship and queer blue inkstand.” Of the Saints more broadly, Kane wrote: “Poor as they are nothing is too good for me. I dare not eat with them, because the little store of sickness diet is brought out for my table—and quite a show of dainties appears upon my plate

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while the good woman of the tent will be munching a crust of dry bread—‘out of preference.’” When he spoke in public, the applause was “positively deafening.” His parents could rest assured that if he became sick, “I will be nursed as zealously as in health I would be defended—in fact, I may say I am idolized by my good friends.” At times, perhaps, Kane proved a nuisance; on one occasion, his horse ran into Woodruff ’s tent and “broke all the poles & tore the tent badley to peaces.” Even so, the Saints showered praise and attention on him.³⁶ Nevertheless, Kane acutely felt the absence of his family and looked to them for advice. “I wish I were back to my law again,” he wrote to his parents. “I am dreadfully homesick.” His parents urged: “Health, health, health, before all and above all. Ambition, philanthropy, expense, all are secondary to us.” Furthermore, they pledged to support him, whether he chose to “go to California, New Mexico, or Fremont’s peak” or return home to “share our creature comforts and unstimulating pursuits . . . We can make you easy here: you may be happier, possibly, or at least more distinguished there.”³⁷ Though Kane sometimes longed for home, intimate association with the Saints convinced him of their sincerity and increased his resolve to champion their cause. Henry G. Boyle, a member of the battalion, accompanied Kane as he roamed around the camps. On one occasion, they came upon a Mormon praying in the woods. Boyle remembered: I never listened to such a prayer, so contrite, so earnest and fervent, and so full of inspiration. We had involuntarily taken off our hats as though we were in a sacred presence. . . . As he [Kane] stood there I could see the tears falling fast from his face, while his bosom swelled with the fullness of his emotions. And for some time after the man had arisen from his knees and walked away towards his encampment, the Colonel sobbed like a child and could not trust himself to utter a word. When, finally, he did get control of his feelings, his first words were, “I am satisfied; your people are solemnly and terribly in earnest.”³⁸

Kane quickly came to see his future and that of the Mormons as knit together. Rather than a temporary partnership with the Saints to vault himself into the public arena through a book, he now envisioned a long-term relationship as the Mormons’ self-appointed defender. The clerkship, with its “fixed duties and a fixed salary,” would free Kane to concentrate his spare time on assisting the Saints, “to manoeuvre the newspapers and write a book in their vindication.” He recognized that shifting public perception was crucial to the Saints’ prospects. “If public opinion be not revolutionized before the Sacramento Country fills up with settlers,” Kane predicted a catastrophic future, with a likely repeat of the earlier Mormon persecutions. However, situated on the “edge of the last western

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water,” the Saints would have nowhere else to flee. He vowed to speak for them, “to tell the world and the people of the Union who these are who have been chased from hearths and altars—from the bosoms of their friends and the graveyards of their parents and children.” To Elisha, he explained his new plan: to write a book about the “Religion & History of the Latter Day Saints” and defend them “from the slanderous part at least of their persecution.” The book would probably only “pay its expenses” and might bring “discredit & revilement,” but it would be a work “of love and a pleasure.”³⁹ To aid in his future efforts to improve Mormon public image, Kane obtained statements from reputable non-Mormons, such as Captain Allen, praising the Saints. In his letter, Allen characterized the Saints as “civil, polite, and honest as a people” and thanked “their principal men . . . for their active and zealous exertions to raise the volunteer force.” Kane also instructed his family to publicize his efforts. Before Kane left for the Mormon camps, Pennsylvania’s governor had appointed him a lieutenant colonel in the militia. He asked his father to insert articles on his appointment in the press: “Without joking, the poor thing has been of use to me in the West, and I must have it in Pennsylvania against going into political life.” He also asked Pat to “manufacture” a letter to the newspapers from the materials Kane had sent his family that would commend the Mormons for their “perfect order & good behaviour.” Even with his prospects on the rise, Kane vacillated between hope and despair, sometimes worrying that he would return as the “poor invalid of old times” and complaining of the “phantoms of sadness and gloom that swarm around me.” Though he had “never been so blest,” he felt a foreboding that seemed to presage coming “calamity.”⁴⁰ In his letters home, perhaps to convince his parents of his decision to become the Mormons’ permanent advocate, he heaped praise on the Saints. He described them as “honest and pure hearted, guiltless seemingly of evil thought,” and he lamented that a people “so innocent, should, for conscience sake in our 19th century, be beaten, robbed, ravished and murdered.” Despite their “unmanly persecution,” the federal government “may look in vain elsewhere for more generous and patriotic supporters.” Their numerous virtues—“pious though not austere, honest, frugal, self sacrificing, humane, decorous”—convinced Kane he would “hunt in vain through our Eastern States for any community of equal size, better entitled no matter how great its pretensions to the name of Christian.” To have been taken seriously by men much older and more experienced than himself must have been deeply satisfying for Kane, and he boasted of his influence with the top tier of Mormon leaders, writing, “I honestly believe that they would not disobey my advice in any important matter unless it touched their creed.” His experience at the camps led him to “love more & more this suf-

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fering people.” Indeed, he had possibly “found in this the mission of my life . . . to save some fifteen thousand souls from misery if not extermination, and make the happiness of perhaps fifty thousand . . . if God spares my life, I will save them from the dangers which now menace them—as great as those which they have gone through.”⁴¹ As part of his efforts to protect the Saints, Kane pleaded with his father to exert his own political influence on their behalf. The Mormons, Kane wrote, “think my influence omnipotent, and expect that I can save them—with your help I will perhaps not disappoint them.” John’s lifelong tenure as a federal judge, Thomas wrote, “luckily places you above any vicious popular feeling and you can afford to give it.” He asked John to lobby Polk for three items: a government contract for the Mormons to build block houses for the army as part of “their chain contemplated to the Pacific country,” a contract for them to carry mail to Oregon and California, and permission for them to winter on Indian lands. Thomas also requested John to pass on letters he had written to Polk and Bancroft urging authorization for the Saints to stay on the Native American land, as well as an agreement the Mormons had recently signed with Pottawatomie tribal leaders to that effect. John should inform Polk that the Saints “are the most peaceable people in the world” and the “Indians like to have them.” Furthermore, Thomas personally guaranteed the Mormons’ departure in the spring. John promised to lobby Polk and later reported on his “long & most confid’l chat with James about the whole matter.” Through his influence, as well as Thomas’s persistence, the federal government granted the Mormon request to winter on Pottawatomie and Omaha tribal lands. Thomas had convinced John “of the general integrity and right mindedness of this persecuted sect,—that they form a class of simple, industrious, kind spirited, and enterprising people.”⁴² Thomas also gave to numerous Mormons letters of introduction to his father, starting a procession of prominent Saints to the Kane home. He specifically instructed his family how to receive various leaders. Perhaps because of Thomas’s conflict with Jesse Little in St. Louis, Little should be impressed with the “heaviest sense of your omnipotence (nothing short of it) and our family dignity & wealth.” John should only briefly meet with him, Pat would “condescend to pump out of him all information about me,” and he should not be invited to dinner. By contrast, “intelligent & unassuming” Apostle Orson Hyde should be given a “courteous reception” and be introduced to “any of our big persons.”⁴³ By late July, Thomas felt his work accomplished. “My labour is over,” he wrote home. “I have nothing to do but to look to my comfort and little even of work at this.” Even so, Kane continued to advise Mormon leaders. He urged the Saints to postpone their emigration—boasting, “My influence has delayed the Mor-

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mons half a season at least”—so that the prior arrival of U.S. troops in California would ensure their safety. In addition, Apostle Woodruff told Kane that he had been “directly informed” that the British “Colonial Department would defray the expenses of a large number of [Mormon] emigrants from the British Islands to California.” Kane recommended that the Saints apply for the aid; while the British government would no longer help the Mormons settle California, “she would no doubt be just as glad to have the help of the Mormon Church in establishing a colony on Vancouvers Island!” The church would thus be established in the “two Great Harbours of the Pacific Coast”—Vancouver Island and San Francisco. The United States would also benefit as the Mormons would exert a “good influence by its cofellowship in fraternizing upon the Pacific Ocean the long parted trading brethren of England & America.” The Apostles, Kane reported, “seemed convinced by my exposition of the case—for indeed men more open to reason & truth plainly stated I have never seen.”⁴⁴ Kane and Mormon leaders also discussed the Saints’ future political situation. On August 7, Kane attended an important council at which Young notified him that the Saints intended to settle not in California but “in the great Bason or Bear valley” of modern-day Utah. Young told Kane the Saints would sustain the federal government, “but we will never submit to mobocracy & mob law.” The solution, Kane suggested, would be to “secure you a Territorial Government Independent.” To soften the political ground, Kane advised the Saints to write resolutions to Polk, praising the president’s “high toned general & Philanthropic course” and pledging to “ever be his grateful Friends & the Friends of the Government.” Young then “preached the gospel of the kingdom” to Kane; a Mormon observer thought the preaching left the “desired impression,” as Kane “frequently shook the hand of the Pres & council as an expression of gratitude.” The Mormons’ resolutions to Polk requested a territorial government and contained high praise for Kane and the president. Kane’s support of “a persecuted and suffering people” combined with Polk’s “kind feelings have rekindled up a spark in our hearts which had been well nigh extinguished.” Furthermore, the Saints told Polk, Kane had promised “that he will continue to use all constitutional powers at his disposal for our good, regardless of popular clamor and cabinet intrigues, to establish us in a land where we can sustain our lives and children.”⁴⁵ Soon after, Kane succumbed to the disease rampant in the Mormon camps. As his illness worsened, the Saints feared outsiders would blame them for his death; to assuage their concerns, Kane instructed them to send for a doctor from Fort Leavenworth if he “showed signs of sinking” so that the doctor could verify he had died of natural causes. Kane promised that all expenses would be paid by himself or his father. On August 10, Young wrote for the doctor to come “sparing

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no time, or expense for change of horses, or breaking of carriages.” On August 12, Kane “was more feverish, had his head shaved, and requested Dr. [Willard] Richards [a Mormon leader] to get a dover powder and bathing tub.” Two days later, the Mormons believed Kane “was lying at the point of death.” Ever aware of his own mortality, Kane penned farewell letters to his parents and to Polk. On August 15, however, Kane’s illness “assumed the appearance of intermittent chill fever” and he began to slowly recover. The military doctor, H. I. W. Edes, arrived after Kane had substantially improved (though to Kane’s chagrin he nevertheless charged two hundred dollars). To his parents, he wrote, “I owe my life to the devoted kindness of those here,” as he had been given “every comfort & luxury,” as well as the “best of nurses.” Kane’s gratitude toward the Saints further solidified his loyalty to their cause.⁴⁶ During Kane’s sickness, the Mormons may have baptized him for the restoration of health, which possibly contributed to later rumors of a secret baptism. No contemporaneous sources hint at such a baptism for health, but in 1906 Kane’s widow Elizabeth wrote that the Saints baptized him in 1846 when he was “delirious and entirely unconscious” and they believed him “to be dying.” She explained: “They hollowed out a log, filled it with water from the Platte and put him in. The shock aroused him, and cooled the fever. Probably it did him good physically, but I never heard any Mormon claim that it did him spiritual good to his own knowledge.” Elizabeth attributed the ritual to the “purest motives” and supposed the Saints “deemed it efficacious to salvation.” Since informed choice is a vital part of Mormon baptism, Elizabeth was no doubt mistaken that the Saints saw it as “efficacious to salvation” to baptize a “delirious” man. In the nineteenth century, the Saints practiced baptism not only for entrance into the church (the rite necessary for salvation), but also on occasion to improve health. Faced with the prospect of losing their young defender, the Mormons may have turned to a religious ritual they hoped might save his life.⁴⁷ Sometime later, Kane reflected on his illness in a letter to a government official, possibly Polk. “Some of the more exalted Mormons hold a superstition that those who interest themselves in their fortunes must pay the penalty of sharing in them during a certain period of probation,” he explained. Captain Allen, the initial commander of the Mormon Battalion, unexpectedly died in August 1846, and some Saints concluded “that the sincerity of his good intentions was proved by the evil issue of his fortunes.” Kane set out for the Mormon camps as “an individual of considerable nervous power, good muscular fibre, quite loud mouthed for a modest youth well calculated in short to be a useful aid to the Mormons.” However, “Just as I was leaving them full of big purposes for their relief I was attacked by the Congestive Fever.” The following spring he suffered from “an en-

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tire prostration of physical energies,” and he intermittently fell ill with ague that rendered him “almost worthless for every good or useful purpose.” His future wife Elizabeth traced some of his recurring health problems to his sickness in the camps.⁴⁸ After Kane’s recovery, he asked for and received a patriarchal blessing, a charismatic ritual normally available only to church members that pronounces divine counsel to an individual. John Smith, an uncle of Joseph Smith and the church patriarch, laid his hands on the head of “Bro. Thomas” and affirmed God’s pleasure with his actions. Smith told Kane that angels had already defended him and promised future protection: “not a hair of thy head shall ever fall by the hands of an enemy for thou art called to do a great work on the earth.” Furthermore, Smith told Kane, “Thy name shall be had in honorable remembrance among the saints to all generations.” In the future, Kane would “be clothed with all the power of the Priesthood” as well as be “able to unfold all the hidden mysteries of the Redeemer’s Kingdom,” clear suggestions that Kane would yet convert to Mormonism. To Kane’s surprise, Smith promised that he would marry and “raise up sons and daughters that shall be esteemed as the excellent of the earth.” As a central part of a patriarchal blessing, a patriarch declares the recipient’s lineage in one of the biblical twelve tribes of Israel; as such, Smith informed Kane that he descended from Joseph through his son Ephraim. The blessings, Smith concluded, were conditional on Kane’s continued service to God.⁴⁹ Five years later, Kane—still sickly and single—asked whether Smith stood by his statement of a large posterity. Smith replied, “It shall hold!” In 1855, after the birth of his first child, Kane wrote to Young, “After my hemorrhage, after the Ague, after my resolve of celibacy; after the Cholera and dysentery, after my wife’s miscarriage and pronounced peculiar state of health even,—it has come to pass; and I am the father of a daughter.” He only regretted that Smith died before seeing his promise fulfilled.⁵⁰ Leaving the camps in early September, Kane traveled to Nauvoo, where he witnessed the aftermath of the “Battle of Nauvoo,” in which 800 men (either Illinois militia or lawless mobbers, depending on the viewpoint) forced the final 640 Mormons to leave the city. The fate of this “poor camp” deeply touched him, and he later memorialized their plight in newspaper articles and in a pamphlet. Kane forged ahead and soon suffered a relapse of his sickness. Summoned by telegraph, Pat traveled “15 hours, under the impression, that he was dead and having made preparations to bring on the body. Pleasant trip?”⁵¹ Even so, the time Kane spent in the camps physically and emotionally invigorated him. Six weeks after his return, his father informed Elisha that Thomas had come home “with a constitution apparently altered, and certainly more flesh &

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more equanimity of spirit than he has had since boyhood.” Pat wrote a more detailed description to Elisha, which despite its teasing tone also suggests his brother’s improvement: “Thomas has returned home, much improved, for instance. There he is, if his leg was only down you might have seen his fly, as usual unbuttoned, old wrapper, stripes down the sleeves, hair short, in fact owing to Missouri (misery) bottoms very short, tolerably long, rather thin, moustache, & goatee, vigorously picking his nose rather red about the gills; gaiters undone, old pair of Pat’s pants, writing Elish a letter, having finished not more than a dozen pages of Editorial matter; having shared out three fights, family fights together, we are in excellent spirits.” Notwithstanding Pat’s brotherly sniping, Thomas viewed his mission as a complete success. He reported to Polk that the president’s “wise and humane policy” combined with his own efforts had secured Mormon loyalty to the nation and personal devotion to the president.⁵² While candid in his initial motivations for befriending the Saints, Kane rarely reflected again on what drew him to the Mormons. As such, his motivations often confused even those closest to him and have puzzled historians. Rumors to the contrary, he never seriously considered converting to Mormonism, though he often looked to the Saints as a source of refuge. At various times, he contemplated joining the Saints in Utah (but always as an outsider, not a convert). In 1852, after reading of his involvement with the Saints, his fiancée Elizabeth asked about his motivations. Kane responded in a lengthy letter, from which pages five to eight are missing. He began page nine: It was thus, after wasting no more time than was absolutely necessary to ingratiate myself with some Mormons in Philadelphia and procure my purposes to be misrepresented; invested with amazingly plenipotential powers civil and military, I went among the Mormons. Bessie, this is a little state secret. Mr. Polk knew it. General Kearney knew it. One Col. Allen detailed by Kearney to march off a Battalion knew it. But probably no one else. And they are all dead, and can tell no tales. And I shall tell none; for I tell it to you, only because it is a secret, and can show you that I already look upon you as my wife.⁵³

What tantalizing secret he shared, presumably on the missing pages, can only be guessed. Perhaps something can be surmised, though, from Elizabeth’s later statements. After Kane’s death, she claimed that he saw the Mormons as a laboratory for his reform ideas. He hoped the Saints would create a “new Puritan commonwealth” through “the principle of cooperation carried out on a great scale—by a simple pastoral people.” She continued, “But like most reformers and theorists

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whose genius and whose aims are very high, Kane was constantly disappointed, when, with the best will to carry out his plans, his pupils put them in what they felt to be sound practical and common-sense shape.” Like other romantic reformers, Kane wanted to apply the perfectionist impulse to an experimental community, which would reject economic inequality and implement a comprehensive vision of the good society.⁵⁴ In 1906, twenty-three years after she buried her husband, Elizabeth returned to the subject of his motivations. She had learned that one Dr. Buckley was planning to “publish a book of travels” that would contain an “erroneous impression of Gen. Kane’s character,” including the claim that he had secretly been a Mormon. Such a story caused her a “mixture of amusement, pain and indignation,” though “pain predominates.” She denied the accusation, arguing: “General Kane was a highly educated man. It would have been as impossible for him as for yourself to accept the teachings or authority of the Book of Mormon or the Book of Doctrine and Covenants.” Influenced by French social scientists, Kane wanted “to study the strange sociological problem presented by the Mormon exodus.” After his sickness, he “owed his life” to the Saints’ “tender care,” and he “showed his gratitude to the Mormons and his pity for that people at the cost of obloquy cast upon him by his dearest friends, and at the risk of his life.” She continued emphatically, “But gratitude and pity were his sole incentives.” Elizabeth conceded that Kane’s admiration for the Mormon community also motivated him, as “he believed that their theory was better than the practice of many of their enemies, and that there was no prostitution in the community before ‘the Gentiles’ brought bad women into the territory.”⁵⁵ In addition, Kane’s own religious unorthodoxy and antipathy toward evangelicalism allowed him to find value in Mormon religion. While his thoughts on Mormonism as a religion are clouded, some hints exist. In 1851, Kane commissioned three gold rings for the Mormon First Presidency. Brigham Young’s ring displayed a beehive along with the Book of Mormon word for honeybee, “Deseret.” On Heber C. Kimball’s ring, Kane inscribed a Book of Mormon phrase, “The Work Shall Commence,” which referred to the prophetic promise “of the building of the City of the New Jerusalem.” For Willard Richards, he included another Book of Mormon phrase, “No Contention in the Land,” which, Kane noted, described a moment in Book of Mormon history when “the love of God . . . did dwell in the hearts of the People.” On all the rings, Kane placed an “escallop or cockle shell,” a symbol of pilgrimage. “You too,” he explained, “have been pilgrims—that fought stoutly too for your religion, before you made the last long and perilous journey that brought you home.” Thus, Kane succinctly described

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the values he admired in the Saints: industry, creation of an idealistic community, the pursuit of peace, and a firm standing against the crowd on behalf of fervent belief.⁵⁶ The Mormon mixing of the spiritual and the secular, the transcendent and the quotidian, also attracted Kane, who praised their “strong stomached faith” that “mixed itself up fearlessly with the common transactions of their every-day life, and only to give them liveliness and color.” The Saints seemed to fulfill elements of Kane’s youthful religious dream of a progressive “religion suited to the 19th century,” particularly in its empowering of the poor and vision of equality. In 1855, he told Young he considered Mormonism as the “one truest of religions” (though he also made clear he would not convert). To opponents of Mormonism, Kane offered a slightly different take. “Their Devotional creed of course, I don’t like,” he explained; even so, it sprang from Christianity and “is no more hideous than its Parent for all its own youthful tricks.”⁵⁷ Kane’s actions shed light on the relationship between unorthodoxy, antebellum reform, and religious minorities. He saw evangelical religion and reform as threatening the liberty of the Mormons, and his own anti-evangelical impulses contributed to his advocacy for the Saints. Kane was not the only unorthodox thinker who came to the Mormons’ defense in part because of their own hostility toward evangelicalism. George Francis Train, an entertaining lecturer whose radical reform included praising the Saints, regularly mocked orthodox Christianity. Horace Greeley, another reformer who departed from the prevailing evangelical orthodoxy, defended the Latter-day Saints at times. The freethinkers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton made common cause with Mormon women. This was not a universal rule; freethinkers could also find much to dislike in Mormonism. Nevertheless, a combination of personal religious doubt, commitment to religious liberty, and an anti-evangelical impulse drove some reformers to defend reviled religious minorities. Kane’s interactions with the Saints suggests a larger pattern in which many radical and unorthodox reformers took a more nuanced and open view toward Mormonism and other marginalized religions than most of their contemporaries.⁵⁸ Certainly, Kane’s motivations evolved from his initial desire to “to help the poor Mormons to my utmost, principally—but also to help myself if I see anything outstanding.” A myriad of factors—growing sympathy for the Mormon cause, belief in the Saints’ sincerity, admiration for their community and certain elements of their religion, genuine friendship with Young and other key leaders, gratitude for his treatment during sickness, his own unorthodoxy—cemented Kane’s decision to become the Mormons’ permanent advocate to the nation.

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These did not preclude personal advancement, as his work for the Saints at times pushed him into the national limelight (even though, as his father correctly pointed out, his influence “is among minorities, and always will be”).⁵⁹ As Elizabeth suggested, Kane’s ideas about reform were paramount to his continuing commitment. While Elizabeth may have been partially correct that Kane viewed the Mormons as a sociological laboratory for his high-minded ideals, she also missed key elements of the relationship between Kane, Mormonism, and reform. Evangelical reformers led the charge against Mormonism throughout the nineteenth century, hoping both to rescue individuals from Mormonism and to protect American civilization and religion from theocracy and polygamy. When Kane spoke of Mormonism and reform, he meant protecting the Latterday Saints and their religious liberty from the evangelical reformers. For him, reform meant defending the downtrodden and speaking in defense of those who could not do so for themselves. Thus, he saw his involvement with the Saints primarily through the lens of reform and built his own sense of self on his romantic image as one who heroically protested social injustices.⁶⁰

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The Suffering Saints

Kane returned from the Mormon camps, he averred, as a changed man. Even though he continued to keep his distance from traditional Christianity, he saw his recovery from sickness at Council Bluffs as providential, telling Brigham Young, “I am spared by God for the labour of doing you justice.” Four years later, Kane depicted his sojourn with the Saints as the crucial transformative experience of his life. He wrote his Mormon friends: “I believe that there is a crisis in the life of every man, when he is called upon to decide seriously & permanently if he will die unto sin and live unto righteousness, and that till he has gone through this he cannot fit himself for the inheritance of his higher humanity, and become truly pure & truly strong, ‘to do the work of God persevering unto the end.’ . . . Such an event I believe too, was my visit to you.” The Saints’ “noble suffering for conscience sake” had convinced Kane that “there was something nobler and higher than the pursuit of interests of Earthly life.” Upon returning home, he committed himself irrevocably to the defense of Mormonism, telling Mormon leaders he would metaphorically serve as their “second in an affair of honor,” as “the personal assaults upon myself made your cause so identified with my own, that your vindication became my own defence as partners in iniquity we were compelled either to stand or fall together.”¹ The intensely negative popular perception of Mormonism convinced Kane that the Saints would never achieve their political aims until “public opinion was corrected,” as the “best method of operating upon the Cabinet is through the press & the conversion of public opinion.” Kane embarked upon his crusade to transform the Mormon image at a particularly propitious moment. The mob murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844 and the subsequent exodus of the Latter-day Saints from Nauvoo created an opportunity to alter public percep-

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tions. The Saints still kept their practice of plural marriage a well-guarded secret, and they had not yet created a theocracy (or theo-democracy in their terms) in the Intermountain West. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, therefore, a window existed in which a compromise between Mormons and the nation seemed conceivable. Kane sought to create a middle ground between the Saints and their enemies that could be claimed by humanitarians interested in alleviating Mormon suffering and nationalists concerned about retaining Mormon loyalty.² To forge this pro-Mormon alliance, he appealed to culturally powerful narratives of religious liberty, persecution, and suffering. There were two main cultural narratives in which to place the Saints. For most, Mormonism fit into a narrative of fraud and fanaticism, a dangerous threat to religion and republicanism. But Mormons could also be depicted as “a misguided but mistreated religious minority who had unjustly suffered for their beliefs, a story resonating with the American story of persecuted Pilgrims fleeing to the New World.”³ Kane took advantage of this historical moment by using a new central motif, the martyred Mormon or suffering Saint, to symbolically represent Mormonism. Since their troubles in Missouri in the 1830s, Mormons had created a narrative of persecution and victimhood that had already become deeply ingrained in Latter-day Saint identity. But as long as this narrative was voiced only by Mormons in their own publications, it could be easily dismissed by outsiders. Portraying himself as an impartial humanitarian, Kane lent this narrative of suffering greater credibility, framed it in terms appealing to a wider audience, and made it acceptable to the American mainstream. By recasting the Saints as worthy recipients of American sympathy rather than as dangerous and deluded fanatics, Kane sought to assist the Mormons and to ensure their loyalty to the nation. In a wide-ranging campaign, he used these themes of martyrdom and suffering, of persecuted Mormons struggling and dying on the plains, to argue that the nation and the Saints could coexist. Correctly surmising that Americans could more easily sympathize with average Mormons than their leaders, he democratized the narrative of Mormon martyrology. While Mormons themselves spoke and wrote often of “The Martyrdom”—the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith—Kane spoke of the martyrdoms of ordinary Saints who died for their beliefs. The Saints’ suffering was especially poignant, he argued, because their persecution was fundamentally religious. As the most high-profile and controversial of the era’s new radical religions (including also spiritualism and communitarian groups like the Shakers and the Oneida community), Mormonism became, along with immigrant Catholicism, the test case for how nineteenth-century Americans negotiated the boundaries of religious liberty. Kane’s descriptions struck a cultural chord because they united

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deeply held ideals of religious tolerance with newer sensibilities about the nature of pain. Kane thus appealed to a rising tide of romantic reformers who had declared war on suffering. Concern about the fragility of American power in the West also contributed to the success of Kane’s tactics. As the Mormons began their emigration to Utah in 1847, they entered into Mexican territory. The end of the Mexican-American War the following year, however, formally transferred the West to the United States and sparked a rancorous sectional debate about the fate of slavery in the newly acquired land. The still shaky American hold over the new western territories and the geographical position of the Mormons in the heart of the West heightened the significance of the question of the Mormons’ loyalty to the federal government. Kane’s portrayal of Mormons’ patriotism amidst their suffering created a cultural moment in the late 1840s and early 1850s in which it became conceivable, even fashionable, to sympathize with the Saints. Significantly, he enlisted all sorts of reformers—radical and moderate, unorthodox and evangelical, southern and abolitionist—in his campaign. For a time, this narrative of Mormon martyrdom captured the attention of America’s opinion-makers and roused substantial sympathy for the Saints. Following the creation of the Utah Territory as part of the Compromise of 1850, President Millard Fillmore, influenced by Kane’s public relations and lobbying, even appointed Brigham Young as governor. Young and other Mormon leaders soon clashed with Fillmore’s non-Mormon territorial appointees, who quickly returned to the East with charges of Mormon obstruction, treason, and polygamy. As Kane prepared to deny these allegations, Mormon leaders admitted to him that they indeed practiced plural marriage. Though shocked, Kane continued to defend the Saints, anonymously coauthoring a hard-hitting pamphlet that helped discredit the “runaway” officials. He also advised the Mormons to publicly acknowledge their practice of polygamy; when they did so in 1852, the Mormons ceded their role as noble victims in a narrative of suffering. Kane’s vision of a rapprochement between the Saints and the nation thus crumbled. Even so, Kane’s savvy use of newspapers and pamphlets illuminates antebellum print culture and reform. Social, cultural, and technological changes transformed print culture during this era. The advance of literacy, particularly in the North, increased the market for print. Simultaneously, technological improvements (especially the telegraph, the steam-driven rotary printing press, and wood-pulp paper) greatly reduced the price and increased the speed of printing. As a result, the number of newspapers proliferated, led by an aggressive and competitive penny press. Sensationalism sold papers and Mormonism—with its

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aura of religious eccentricity, history of violent clashes, rumors of sexual impropriety, and setting in the American West—became a frequently and vigorously debated topic in the press.⁴ Like Kane, most reformers believed deeply in the power of print and almost instinctively turned to newspapers and pamphlets to promote their unpopular causes. Kane did so most often in his reform activities by placing in Philadelphia’s papers unsigned editorials and articles, which were often picked up by other newspapers. He used similar tactics during these same years to catapult his older brother Elisha into national prominence, first as a hero in the MexicanAmerican War and then as a dashing explorer of the Arctic. Indeed, Kane’s advocacy for the Saints bore several similarities to his boosterism for Elisha. Both campaigns shared several key newspapers and editors, in particular the Pennsylvanian and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. In the two efforts, Kane tapped into deep public interest; Arctic explorations were a rage in the antebellum era, somewhat akin to the space exploration of the 1950s and 1960s, and the controversy over Mormonism was often front-page news. And in both, he unabashedly sought to use the press to “manufacture” public opinion and create popular images—whether of the suffering Saints or the heroic Dr. Kane (as the nation came to know Elisha)—without revealing the machinations involved. In so doing, he revealed a distinctively modern understanding of the power of image.⁵ Soon after his return from the Mormon camps, Kane made his initial forays into covert Mormon public relations. First, he fabricated “supposed impartial letters,” purportedly written from western cities, that defended the Mormons. After he had softened public sentiment with these letters, he sent anonymous “feelers” to Philadelphia papers with which he had connections. He subsequently embarked on the “hard knocks”—direct newspaper appeals in Philadelphia and New York. In late November, Kane expressed “sanguine hopes of success,” as he had already published “feelers” in several prominent newspapers and had made “such arrangements with the leading press” so that he would “no longer be confined to ‘long shots’ but open the battery for direct & close fire.” Furthermore, editors had told him “they are ready to commence plain-dealing in behalf of persecuted Mormons.” Given the newspaper networks of the day and the need for smaller papers to borrow and reprint stories, Kane’s letters and editorials reached a wide audience. Although the full extent of his campaign is hidden in pseudonymous letters to long-forgotten newspapers, Kane later recalled that during the winter of 1846–47, he “wrote papers by the dozen for them and in their names—mendicant, meaning, adulatory—anything in the world to bring round public opinion in their favor.”⁶

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Kane’s newspaper campaign revolved around the motif of the suffering Saints. A letter from an anonymous correspondent from St. Louis published in the Pennsylvanian (likely one of Kane’s fabrications) lambasted Illinoisans for their persecution: “young and old, strong and weak, all alike the objects of bitter persecution, robbed, beaten, ducked, whipped, outraged, murdered without an attempt at resistance on their part.” Anonymous western letters published in Greeley’s Tribune (also probably Kane’s productions) likewise detailed how an “army of reforming moralists” had raped, pillaged, murdered, and expelled the Saints. An accompanying editorial echoed the testimony of an “informant” who knew “from extensive personal observation that the Mormons are a virtuous, chaste, frugal, industrious, inoffensive people, and that the impulse of their persecutors has been that of sheer robbery, outrage and lust.” The Pennsylvanian also identified its source as a “friend of ours, who has recently passed the summer months in the neighborhood of the camp of Mormon emigrants.” The unnamed source, obviously Kane, had elicited the editors’ aid by lamenting that the “peaceable, industrious, and prospering” Mormons had been “expelled without other cause of reproach, than the eccentricities of their religious faith.” Reducing the causes of Mormon mistreatment to religious bigotry alone—particularly galling when juxtaposed against the rhetoric and tradition of American religious freedom— became a key argument in Kane’s campaign to create the image of the suffering Saints.⁷ According to favorable newspaper accounts, Kane’s efforts rapidly altered the public climate. The New York Sun noted that “considerable interest and sympathy begin to prevail in favor of the Mormons.” In early January, the Pennsylvanian expressed its pleasure that “many other journals,” particularly New York newspapers, had followed its example in condemning the anti-Mormons. Kane’s appeals also attracted substantial opposition. In late November, Kane told a visiting Mormon, Orson Spencer, of his “utter astonishment at the irrational & sensitive conduct of distinguished men, both politically & religiously, in opposition to our favor.” Kane claimed that two-thirds of the trustees of the Presbyterian General Assembly had visited him, and Dr. Robert J. Breckenridge, “Chief among the Chief Priests,” had come from Baltimore “solely to expostulate with him.” Breckenridge, a renowned theological debater, had declared, “what in the name of God are you doing! Do you mean to uphold the Mormon religion?”⁸ Kane operated with explicit political goals in mind; changing public opinion was a means of gaining political support for the Mormons. For instance, he lobbied to gain government contracts to give Mormons desperately needed cash in exchange for construction of forts on the frontier. He also sought to blunt criticisms from western members of Congress who feared that the “Mormon Camp

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intended to loiter . . . & not go over the Mountains at all.” Spencer told other Mormon leaders that Kane “is filled with the right spirit from head to foot at present,” and Kane, though he remained nominally a Presbyterian, commented that “he felt at home & with brethren” when among the Saints. Mormons closely followed Kane’s public relations campaign, which “produced a most thrilling sensation” among them.⁹ The following year, Kane and Brigham Young—inspired by the outpouring of American philanthropy for Irish famine victims—decided to directly appeal to the public to raise charitable donations for the Saints. The devastating famine became widely publicized in the United States during the winter of 1846– 47, and leading citizens from across the religious and political spectrum came together to create famine relief committees. These committees raised funds by emphasizing the suffering of the Irish and the common ties of humanity that transcended national and sectarian differences. Young believed that the Mormons’ situation—lacking “meat and clothing” as well as the “comforts of health and necessaries”—constituted a similar basis for philanthropy. He urged Kane to appeal to the “rich, noble, liberal, benevolent and philanthropic, to unloose their purse strings in behalf of this suffering and patriotic people.”¹⁰ Besides providing needed cash, fund-raising would afford the best opportunity yet for Kane to create a public image of the suffering Saints. The suffering strategy, however, held risks as well as potential rewards for the Mormons. The Mormon movement had splintered over succession issues after the death of Joseph Smith, with the charismatic James J. Strang (a recent convert who claimed Smith had secretly appointed him as successor) as the principal opponent to Young and the Twelve Apostles. Strang, who advocated the resettlement of the Saints in Wisconsin, persuaded large numbers of Mormons. The Strangite press highlighted reports of sickness at Winter Quarters to strengthen their own claims to the mantle of Smith. Strang and Young were actively vying to secure the loyalty of the booming communities of English Mormons, and emphasizing the plight of Young’s followers at Winter Quarters would only make it more difficult to persuade the English Saints to gather with the “Brighamites.” Thus, Young and other leaders minimized the extent of disease and death at Winter Quarters in letters to church members. Mormon letters and journals told a much darker, and more accurate, story of epidemic diseases ravaging the camps. From June 1846 to May 1847, the high point of mortality in the camps, more than 700 people died in a population of about 8,750, roughly 1 in 12.¹¹ Nevertheless, Young and Kane determined that the potential benefits of creating an image of the suffering Saints—improved public opinion, possible government support, donations—outweighed the risks. Their decision was also

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stimulated by the success of two missionaries, with extensive assistance from Kane, in raising funds throughout the East in 1847. Kane assisted the missionaries by taking “the responsibility of laying our claims before the public,” making his “office a place of deposit,” and providing travel expenses and letters of introduction (including to President Polk and Secretary of State James Buchanan, who each gave personal donations). He also organized a fund-raising meeting in Philadelphia in October 1847 that solidified the pattern for future efforts. A committee of prominent citizens gave the meeting legitimacy; the mayor presided, and well-known community leaders were listed as vice presidents. Both Kane and the missionaries spoke, emphasizing the Mormons’ persecution and the need for philanthropy to avert a humanitarian disaster. Just as the testimony of ex-slaves lent an aura of credibility and urgency to abolitionist meetings, the missionaries’ personal accounts proved crucial to the Mormon cause. The role of Kane as a humanitarian who had witnessed Mormon suffering further bolstered their claims. The meeting established a fund-raising committee and passed resolutions lamenting the Mormons’ “calamitous suffering” and defending their patriotism and morality.¹² Afterward, Kane engaged in his usual publicity tactics, including ghostwriting newspaper articles. The gap between the reality of the meeting, attended by “about 10 or 12 persons,” and the published description listing sixteen vice presidents reveals the ploy. Copies of a broadside containing the meeting’s resolutions were sent to politicians and editors throughout the country. In a draft of a newspaper article, Kane emphasized the disparity between American rhetoric about religious freedom and the reality of repression of minorities, writing that modern Americans had countenanced a “religious persecution” that would have “disgraced the worst age.”¹³ Scandalous rumors, however, quickly threatened to overwhelm Kane’s fledgling fund-raising. Boston newspapers exploded with a story containing a tantalizing mix of religious fanaticism and sexual misconduct. Four years earlier, Augusta Adams Cobb, an upper-class Mormon convert, left Boston for Nauvoo, leaving behind her non-Mormon husband, a prosperous merchant, and five of their seven children. Once in Nauvoo, she married Brigham Young as a plural wife. Her husband filed for divorce in 1847, and the Boston press, aided by dissident Saints, was rife with sordid accusations. While recognizing that the press always had an “abundant supply” of lies about Mormons, Kane complained that these accusations could cause “the whole concern [to] fall to the ground.” Unaware of Mormon polygamy, he asked Young for a “true statement of facts” to respond to the situation.¹⁴ In early 1848, Young sent additional high-ranking Mormons, including

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apostles Ezra Taft Benson, Amasa Lyman, and Erastus Snow, to assist in the fund-raising. In all, between 100 and 150 missionaries fanned out through the United States to solicit donations from the general public and church members who had not yet “gathered” to the West. Benson and Snow enlisted Kane’s help in advancing their missions in the large eastern cities. Benson found Kane discouraged, probably from the recent Boston brouhaha, but persuaded Kane to accompany him to Boston in February 1848. Benson soon reported that the “little Col[onel] is in good spirrits . . . and is exerting himself to the utmost.” Kane and his associates successfully turned the Boston papers away from accusations of Mormon polygamy to stories of Mormon suffering. As in Philadelphia, leading citizens—including abolitionist Charles Sumner, Charles Francis Adams (son of John Quincy Adams), and Boston mayor Josiah Quincy Jr.—spearheaded the efforts. Kane amplified the publicity by sending favorable newspaper notices to be reprinted in other papers.¹⁵ Kane and the Mormon fund-raisers next turned their attention toward New York City, where Kane confidently predicted they would increase “popular sympathy” and raise “several thousand dollars.” “After that,” he told Elisha, “they are safe, and I can go home . . . and sleep sound, on a conscience like a feather bed.” An article in the New York Tribune, possibly penned by Kane, made the initial call for donations, predicting that five thousand dollars “will probably save the lives of two or three thousand human beings.” The article presented Kane as a romantic humanitarian, whose “contact with these persecuted fugitives” taught him to “feel, as any true man must, a profound sympathy for their unmerited woes.” Believing that the cause of the suffering Saints could unite a wide variety of reformers, Kane organized a meeting that included evangelical reformers like Lewis Tappan and Theodore Frelinghuysen (a former Whig senator and vice presidential candidate), prominent Democrats such as former Jackson attorney general Benjamin F. Butler and legal scholar and polemicist Theodore Sedgwick, and other community notables such as Jewish leader Mordecai Manual Noah.¹⁶ Nevertheless, fund-raising proved a frustrating chore. One missionary griped that most people would “rather give me kicks than coppers and say that the sooner we are out of existence the better for us.” Jesse Little grumbled that the people “have a sympathy for the suffering Mormons (in Talk but not in money).” Other missionaries felt more satisfied. William Appleby thought “our success in raising means has come up to near our expectations, or at least to mine!” The difficulty of fund-raising illustrates the limits of Kane’s success in altering public opinion in the face of scandalous stories and entrenched attitudes. Even so, the

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combined efforts raised an estimated ten thousand dollars for the Saints and popularized a new image of the Mormons in the American consciousness.¹⁷ Kane’s appeals relied on his efforts to transform the image of the Mormons so that Americans could see them as worthy objects of philanthropy. A widely reprinted letter that he wrote in February 1848 to Mayor Josiah Quincy Jr. established the central narrative. Kane created a persona as a sympathetic yet impartial observer dedicated to giving a “simple, uncolored narrative, for the consideration of the charitable rather than the curious.” He focused not on the main Mormon camp, but on “certain stragglers in the rear.” These Saints—the “refuse, lame, aged, sick and pauper members”—had been left in Nauvoo under a treaty with the “anti-Mormon mob” that they could remain there until the main body had been established in the West. After the able-bodied Saints had left, the mob broke their agreement, and the “cripples who relied upon it were ordered to take up their beds and walk.” After a short battle in September 1846, the “hospital of incurables” abandoned Nauvoo. Across the Mississippi River, these Saints— short of food and facing epidemic diseases—witnessed the “orthodox bullies of the mob . . . celebrating their triumph in obscene and drunken riot.” Unable to reach the main Mormon camps, these Saints were still threatened by starvation and disease. Kane urged Quincy, “They are dying while we are talking about them.”¹⁸ Sympathetic press reaction echoed Kane’s basic claims. An editorial that accompanied the reprinting of Kane’s letter in the New York Tribune charged, “the Bartholomew Massacre, Witch-burnings and other popular madnesses of dark ages afford the only adequate parallels to the atrocities which we have patiently, placidly, unresistingly suffered to be inflicted—in violation of every principle of Nationality and of the common rights of Humanity—allowed to be perpetrated upon the poor, deluded fanatics opprobriously known as Mormons.” Noting that Americans had “raised money freely for Greece, for Ireland, and for other needy supplicants,” the Tribune queried, “can we do nothing for our own perishing countrymen, the victims of our bigotry, our faithlessness and our rapacity?”¹⁹ Central to Kane’s narrative thrust was his demonization of Illinoisans for expelling the Saints. In 1848, the Warsaw Signal, an Illinois paper near Nauvoo, demanded that the Philadelphia-based American Courier retract statements in support of Kane’s declaration that the Mormons had signed a treaty with the socalled “anti-Mormon mob” to allow the weaker Saints to temporarily remain at Nauvoo. Using the language of honor, the Signal accused Kane of having been “gulled” by the Mormons and challenged him to prove the treaty’s existence. In response, the Courier defended Kane as a “man of strict honor,” though ad-

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mitted he “may have been misled in some particulars.” Nevertheless, for the Courier, Kane’s central claim—that the Mormons were “in great suffering and destitution” as a result of their expulsion from Illinois—was indisputable.²⁰ Kane’s descriptions of the suffering Saints achieved some cultural success in part because they reflected changing ideas about pain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whereas earlier generations saw pain as inevitable and redemptive, Kane and his contemporaries increasingly viewed suffering as unacceptable and even eradicable. Trends in both liberal and evangelical religion provoked the shift. Liberal Christians transformed God from a wrathful sovereign to a benevolent Father and “downgraded the role of suffering in moral growth.” Meanwhile, evangelicals emphasized religion of the heart focused on compassion. Advances in medicine also helped transform the cultural meaning of pain. In the early 1800s, doctors began to define pain as a “treatable pathology rather than as divine punishment”; in 1846, ether was first successfully used as an anesthetic. The combination of these trends encouraged reformers to reimagine pain, particularly deliberately inflicted suffering, less as an inevitable part of human life and more as a moral flaw in society.²¹ Humanitarian reformers reacted to and reinforced this new repudiation of pain, as they focused on cruelty to the insane, soldiers and sailors, prisoners, slaves, and even animals. In particular, reformers denounced cruelty perpetrated against the weak in hierarchical relationships of power. Not coincidentally, this cluster of reforms—antislavery in particular and improved treatment of the downtrodden in general—animated Kane’s career in reform. The influence of reform literature can readily be seen in Kane’s construction of the Mormons’ image. Reform literature denounced cruelty by graphically depicting the victims’ suffering. The image of the “suffering slave” became ubiquitous through abolitionist literature, which highlighted explicit tales of cruelty to slaves. Eyewitness accounts and slave autobiographies lent authority to the abolitionist critiques. Yet even proslavery advocates accepted the general contours of the reaction against pain, arguing that slavery protected slaves from the suffering they would encounter if they were free.²² Kane’s image-making success also resulted from his carefully cultivated relationships with editors. When Mormon leaders sent him gold from the California Gold Rush, he had it “made up into seal rings for the leading friends who have assisted in your vindication,” including Greeley. Kane’s friendship with Greeley (which continued until Greeley’s death in 1872) had likely begun in 1845 when they both agitated for the abolition of the gallows. Kane occasionally wrote articles for Greeley’s paper, promoted Greeley’s books in the Philadelphia press, and often visited Greeley’s home. The relationship proved useful to both

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men, as Kane served as Greeley’s pipeline for Mormon news. “Pray let me hear whenever you shall receive any letters from that quarter,” Greeley told him.²³ Kane’s public relations campaign crested at a crucial political moment. After their removal to the West in 1847, the Mormons had sought, with Kane’s assistance, to form a territorial government. In late 1848, however, Kane changed his views on the desirability of a territorial government after President Polk indicated that he would appoint his own officials, rather than Mormons, as the territory’s officers. Foreseeing the inevitable tensions that would arise between outside officials and Mormons, Kane urged the Saints to seek statehood. His advice, which because of mail delays reached Utah only in July 1849, immediately changed Mormon thinking. Mormon leaders drafted a constitution for a planned State of Deseret and even fabricated the existence of a constitutional convention, which had supposedly met in March 1849 to approve the constitution.²⁴ Kane also strongly advised the Saints to pursue a policy of strict political neutrality in lobbying for a state government. The Mormons could properly take positions on issues that directly affected them—“Land Liberty, the North Line Pacific Rail Road, Postal Reform, Indian Affairs, Direct Provision for territorial necessities”—but should otherwise refrain from weighing in on contemporary issues, especially slavery. Kane trusted that the Mormons were squarely in the antislavery camp; however, they could not help the abolitionist cause and could only endanger their own interests by making antislavery statements or legislation. Furthermore, neutrality would cause both political parties to court the Saints until “pretty Utah . . . is ripe for the Union.” The Mormon petition for statehood reached the East as Congress debated the organization of territories and states from the land acquired in the Mexican-American War, though sectional disputes about the future of slavery threatened to engulf any other consideration.²⁵ To create a public climate more conducive for the admission of the State of Deseret, Kane made his most influential statement on Mormon suffering in an 1850 pamphlet, The Mormons. Complaining that he had tired of his “usual course” of planting pro-Mormon articles in “our different seaboard newspapers”—an approach that had “to be renewed on an average at least once in the quarter”—Kane decided to “edit something of a less fugitive nature.” Furthermore, the public had grown weary of his “iteration of the same points of argument” and desired “something narrative and fanciful that would challenge attention and carry its pleading by implication.” He thus accepted an invitation to lecture at the Pennsylvania Historical Society in March 1850 to present a more sustained defense of the Mormons.²⁶ Kane portrayed his literary labors to his Mormon friends in heroic terms.

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Though severely ill, he trudged on through “pain and weakness.” Dismissing the warnings of his family and friends, Kane composed the lecture “sitting up in my bed over a foot bath of hot water maybe, with a bottle of strong tea to my hand, and a towel soaked in brandy round my forehead, scratching away when my house was quiet and its inmates in their sleep.” Unable to walk, Kane was carried to his lecture. A “strong drug to diminish the action of the heart and circulation” enabled him to deliver the lecture “without hemorrhage.” A newspaper reported that Kane’s “large and intelligent” audience listened with the “closest attention.” Furthermore, the paper characterized his lecture as “well calculated to win a feeling of sympathy . . . [and] to remove in the minds of his hearers the prejudice existing against this people.” After its completion, Kane wrote, “it seemed all over with me; I fainted away before I reached home, and, for days after, was so prostrated as hardly to be able to move in bed.”²⁷ Kane disclaimed interest in publication, believing he “had accomplished his object in delivering it.” Besides, he explained to Young, “It is contrary to my Rule to print anything of literary pretension over my signature.” However, Kane soon allowed John M. Bernhisel, a gentlemanly Mormon doctor who represented the Saints in the East, to persuade him to publish the discourse as a pamphlet in order to sway the minds of political and cultural leaders. Accordingly, they sent pamphlets by the dozens to newspaper editors and national politicians.²⁸ In his lecture and pamphlet, Kane reiterated the narrative of Mormon suffering he had developed since 1846. He opened with an eerie description of recently abandoned Nauvoo, which he purported to have happened on by accident in September 1846 (though, in reality, he had gone there by design after his sojourn in the Mormon camps). “The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it. For plainly it had not slept long,” Kane reported. At the Mormon temple, he encountered armed men who boasted of their ruthless expulsion of the Saints. In a move typical of reform literature, Kane described the violence of the vigilantes with eroticized language. As the Illinoisans gleefully desecrated the temple, “their boisterous orgies strove to attain a sort of ecstatic climax, a cruel spirit of insulting frolic carried some of them up into the high belfry of the Temple steeple, and there, with the wicked childishness of inebriates, they whooped, and shrieked, and beat the drum.”²⁹ Kane sharply contrasted these actions with the suffering in the Mormon camps, weaving specific anecdotes of dying Mormons with more generalized descriptions of their suffering: “Cowed and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. . . . They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of

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their sick: they had not bread to quiet the fractious hunger cries of their children.” Unlike his earlier writings, Kane focused not only on the travails of the weaker Saints who had been initially left at Nauvoo, but also on the ordeals of the main body of Mormons. Widespread sickness, exacerbated by the hot, wet climate of their camps, incapacitated even the “hardiest and strongest” and led to frequent deaths. Starvation did not kill outright only because the Mormons shared their scanty supplies with each other. In the summer of 1846, disease, to which Kane himself succumbed, swept through the camps. He wrote, “Here at one time the digging got behind hand: burials were slow; and you might see women sit in the open tents keeping the flies off their dead children, sometime after decomposition had set in.” With tragic irony, the advance camps of the Saints found “redeeming comfort” in their own suffering because they believed it purchased “immunity to their friends” at Nauvoo.³⁰ Kane portrayed the Saints as noble victims, morally and socially superior to their persecutors, much like abolitionists portrayed the “suffering slaves” as a civilized contrast to their brutish masters. Kane compared the Saints, “persons of refined and cleanly habits and decent language,” with the “vile scum” of Missouri and Iowa. Though in deep poverty, Mormon men patriotically volunteered to serve in the war with Mexico. The conduct and attire of Mormon women, which “spoke of a poverty that had known its better days,” particularly revealed the Saints’ refinement. The genteel Saints valued a brass band that played Mendelssohn on the plains. Furthermore, Kane argued that the Mormons’ successes in Utah demonstrated their value to the nation. Relying on reports from his Mormon friends, he painted an idyllic portrait of Utah society, where “again has returned the merry sport of childhood, and the evening quiet of old age, and again dear house-pet flowers bloom in garden plots round happy homes.” In addition, the Saints extended their hospitality to hundreds of emigrants headed annually for California and would prove indispensable to any future transcontinental railroad plan. He also recounted how seagulls had saved, in seemingly miraculous fashion, the Mormons’ crops from hordes of ravenous crickets during their first year in Utah, an event that probably first appeared in print in Kane’s pamphlet and became deeply embedded within Mormon folklore.³¹ Whereas most reformers based their ability to speak authoritatively on their firsthand witnessing of suffering, Kane claimed additional credibility because he had actually shared in the Mormons’ travails. He nevertheless faced the dilemma of how to present graphic scenes of suffering, for it was widely assumed that witnessing or reading about cruelty could deform the moral nature of both reformer and reader. Reformers thus used “a variety of narrative strategies designed to distance themselves from any imputations of sensationalistic pander-

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ing.” For example, Kane noted that his own sickness excused him “sufficiently the attempt to get up for your entertainment here any circumstantial picture of horrors.” Indeed, Kane’s litanies of Mormon hardships existed uneasily with his own demurrals from writing a “minute narrative” of the Saints’ suffering. Further recitation, he claimed, would only incite readers’ impatience: “The world is full of griefs, and we cannot afford to expend too large a share of our charity, or even our commiseration in a single quarter.”³² For a time, Kane’s campaign made it fashionable to sympathize with the downtrodden Mormons. Charles Sumner praised Kane’s “good & glorious work.” Reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips “devoured” the essay and asked Kane to send a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had expressed interest “in you & your subject.” Walter H. Channing, a Boston doctor and reformer, praised the pamphlet’s “manly good sense and magnanimity” and advised Kane to send copies to politicians, libraries, and literary reviews in the United States and England. Kane’s father wrote that the pamphlet “made a great sensation, and has fairly revolutionized public opinion.”³³ The success of Kane’s pamphlet can be seen in the responses of two highly polarized worlds of print: a journal of the southern elite and the northern abolitionist press. The Southern Literary Messenger, which two years earlier had published a highly critical article on Mormonism, lauded Kane’s essay, hoping that it would relieve the Mormons “from the load of obloquy by which they have been oppressed.” In two years, the Mormons were transformed in the pages of the Messenger from dangerous fanatics to orderly, disciplined, patriotic Americans, ready to “take their seats with our legislators in the national councils.” In his newspaper, Frederick Douglass praised Kane’s pamphlet as “entertaining, eloquent and exciting.” Douglass integrated the Mormon example into his larger critique of “the feebleness of the American government in protecting human rights, and the hollowness of that boast of civil and religious liberty.” Fellow abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier wrote that the Saints’ “heroic persistence under circumstances of suffering and danger” would “go far to reconcile liberal and generous minds to those absurdities or novelties of worship and faith.”³⁴ Mormon leaders, who had already named their principal town in Iowa Kanesville, also commended Kane. Apostle Orson Hyde told him the pamphlet “will forever immortalize your name on the records, and in the memory of the Saints.” The Mormon press republished Kane’s lecture in the United States and England, and Apostle Franklin D. Richards informed Kane that in England “tens of thousands . . . venerate your name and many remember you in their prayers.” Some Saints seemed surprised at the outpouring of support Kane’s pamphlet

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generated. After reading Whittier’s article, the editor of a Mormon newspaper told Kane he almost believed it “emanated from your own pen, because we know of no other, who would, or dare express principle so naked, and so opposed to public feeling and views except yourself.”³⁵ Some, however, dissented from the praise. Dr. James Blake, a member of a government expedition that had recently surveyed the Great Salt Lake region, responded with three stinging letters to the Sacramento Transcript. The “unbearable social nuisance” of the Mormons, Blake charged, not “religious intolerance,” had motivated their expulsion. Americans should thus oppose Utah statehood and ignore the “one-sided reports of official gents, purchased by the expenditure of a little flattery on the part of the Mormon leaders.”³⁶ Even so, Kane’s pamphlet exerted an enduring influence on nineteenthcentury perceptions of the Saints. While most of the vast reams of pro- and anti-Mormon literature of the era proved fleeting, his pamphlet continued to be quoted throughout the century. It even reached an international audience. Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words deemed his pamphlet “extremely interesting,” and the Edinburgh Review quoted Kane’s passages on Mormon suffering in an otherwise highly negative article on Mormonism. The prominent English journalist Henry Mayhew included almost the entire pamphlet verbatim in his 1852 history of Mormonism.³⁷ Kane’s pamphlet arrived in the hands of congressmen and newspaper editors during the summer of 1850 as the House and Senate debated a package of compromise bills, proposed by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, designed to solve the question of slavery in the western territories. Notwithstanding the positive press coverage, Kane’s pamphlet failed to persuade Congress to admit the State of Deseret. Rather, Mormon ambitions were caught up in the national disputes over slavery. As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress admitted Utah as a territory, though stripped of its Mormon name of Deseret and with its borders severely curtailed (only including present-day Utah, most of Nevada, and pieces of Colorado and Wyoming, as opposed to the Mormon plan to also include a large part of present-day California and most of Arizona, with boundaries extending into Oregon, Idaho, and New Mexico as well). The failure of this initial attempt to gain Utah statehood profoundly influenced the nineteenth-century history of the Latter-day Saints, the American West, and the nation. The inevitable tensions between Mormon officials and outside federal appointees guaranteed nearly continual disputes in Utah between religious and secular leaders. The nature of territorial governance—supervised by Congress, with officials appointed by the president—meant that the battles between the Mormons and

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the territorial appointees, as well as the broader question of Mormonism’s place in the nation, remained hotly debated national political issues for the rest of the century.³⁸ Having lost the battle for statehood, the attention of Kane, now in somewhat better health, and Bernhisel turned to securing a measure of Mormon selfgovernment within the territorial system by lobbying for the appointment of Mormon officials in Utah, particularly Young to the most coveted post of governor. As President Millard Fillmore, a Whig, pondered his appointments, he faced a changed public environment, which was both weary of sectional disputes, even with the Mormons in the West, and growing more sympathetic to the Saints as a result of Kane’s pamphlet. Fillmore first offered the position of governor to Kane, who declined and urged the president to appoint Young instead. In a substantial coup for the Saints, Fillmore followed Kane’s advice and named Young as governor, as well as appointed three other Mormons to territorial positions; he balanced these selections with several non-Mormons, including Broughton D. Harris of Vermont as secretary, Lemuel G. Brandebury of Pennsylvania as chief justice, and Perry E. Brocchus of Alabama as associate justice.³⁹ Fillmore’s appointments could have turned out even better for the Saints, as he had been prepared to appoint Mormons to nearly all positions. However, the actions of Almon W. Babbitt—a nominal Mormon and fervent Democrat whom Mormon leaders had sent to assist Bernhisel in representing the Mormons in Washington—torpedoed that possibility. While Kane worked effectively with Bernhisel, he disdained Babbitt, who openly “made light of his religion” and associated “freely with a rabble of dissolute persons.” More to the point, Babbitt had proved not only a “bad man, but a very weak one,” whose antics “alienated and disgusted serious and sober men of both sides.” According to Kane, Babbitt attempted to replace the approved Mormon list of hoped-for appointees with a slate of his personal friends, which led Fillmore to consider appointing only outsiders to Utah positions. Kane’s lobbying of Fillmore—an acquaintance from their mutual days as Free Soilers—salvaged some of the posts for the Saints.⁴⁰ Fillmore’s appointment of Young embroiled him and Kane in a high-profile dispute, in which Kane’s deft dealings with the press were particularly evident. In early July 1851, the Buffalo Courier, a Democratic paper, lambasted Fillmore’s appointment, citing Mormon abuse of California emigrants passing through Utah, collusion with Native Americans, disloyalty to the federal government, and rumors of Young’s polygamy. In response, Fillmore wrote Kane a public letter that shifted the burden for Young’s appointment onto Kane, who had vouched for Young. Kane promptly responded in two letters to Fillmore, one public, which briefly defended Young’s “irreproachable moral character,”

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and one marked “personal,” which rebutted at length the specific accusations. On July 15, the Republic, a Whig newspaper closely associated with the Fillmore administration, excerpted portions of Kane’s letters to defend Fillmore. Kane complained the article “garbled” his letters, only including portions useful for “making Whig capital.” In addition, the Republic twisted his words to suggest he had “admitted by implication the spiritual wife slander and that of leaguing with the Indians.” Even so, Kane feared the Republic’s tepid defense of the Mormons would associate the Saints with Whigs and cause “all the petty Democratic papers glad to cater to the bigotry, political and religious, of their readers” to slur the Saints. The “superior journals” would inevitably follow suit: “Good bye, in short, to all the advantages of the Neutral Position.”⁴¹ Two days later, on July 17, the Buffalo Courier retracted its charges, citing a “communication from a friend at the East” which had convinced the editors that the allegations lacked merit. Significantly, the Courier disassociated Mormonism from the Whig Party, describing Young’s prior politics as “soundly Democratic.” Two days after the Courier’s retraction, the Pennsylvanian defended Kane, “who vindicates the Mormons, not as a partisan, but as their known, their eloquent, and their most disinterested friend.” The Pennsylvanian also appealed to “one of the fundamental articles” of the Democratic Party, namely, the “freest toleration in regard to every religious belief.” Finally, the Pennsylvanian published a letter from Kane which complained that the editor of the Republic had misused his personal correspondence with Fillmore. Following this complaint, the Republic, under orders from Fillmore, apologized to Kane.⁴² Kane explained this confluence of retractions and positive statements to Young. After the Republic’s initial article, with its threat to Mormon neutrality, Kane had swung into action, writing to the Pennsylvanian and having “the screws put” on the Courier to publish its retraction, which he actually penned. The timing worked perfectly, Kane boasted, and the entire episode placed the Mormons in a position to be courted by both parties. Indeed, the “little Democratic pack of country editors” had sensed the shifting political winds and “bays out Mormons praises as good as if they were sincere.”⁴³ Given these successes, Kane announced triumphantly to Mormon leaders that “the battle for the Mormon Reputation” had been won. He considered the praise of himself and his pamphlet as a “sign to me of comforting significance. For when there is something to be gained by it you will not lack for advocates.” Young and his counselors quickly disabused Kane of this naive notion. With apocalyptic certainty, they assured him that the “War between the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdoms of the World (or Satan) will wax hotter and hotter, with occasional slight intervals of rest, in appearance only . . . We drop this hint to a

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friend that he may not be found with his armor off, while spies attack him when asleep or to be ambushed in the rear.”⁴⁴ Latter-day Saint officials had cause for concern, notifying Kane in the same letter that the non-Mormon territorial officials were already returning to the East. A host of administrative and cultural issues had led to clashes between the officials and Mormon leaders. Tensions heightened considerably when the Saints allowed Brocchus to speak at a church conference in September 1851. In a long-winded discourse, Brocchus questioned Mormon patriotism (taking particular issue with Young’s declaration that Zachary Taylor was in hell) and, referring to polygamy, rebuked Mormon women for immorality. Fearing for their lives from the incensed Saints, the new officials fled the territory and published an extensive list of charges against the Mormons.⁴⁵ Controversy again threatened to undo Kane’s careful campaign to improve the Saints’ image. Mormon leaders asked him to assist in damage control and sent Jedediah M. Grant, the mayor of Salt Lake City and a trusted Saint, to work with Kane and Bernhisel. A colorful leader and powerful orator who had struck up a friendship with Kane at the Mormon camps in 1846, Grant called himself “Mormon Thunder” and was derided by eastern newspaper reporters as “Brigham’s Sledgehammer.” Grant considered Kane an indispensable ally in rebutting the constant allegations of “Treason, Poligamy, Profanity, Abominations.”⁴⁶ After Grant’s arrival, Kane prepared a letter to Fillmore denying that Mormons practiced polygamy. Grant, who had “fondly hoped” that Kane “had some faint idea of our domestic relations,” thus found himself “under the disagreeable necessity” of informing him of the reality of plural marriages among Mormons. To justify the practice, Grant explained that faithful women outnumbered Mormon men by a ratio of three to two, “showing that one third of our women must remain single, or marry out of the church.” God then granted the Saints a special “dispensation” allowing polygamy. Grant emphasized that the practice was “limited and strict” and stated that “the rights of women among us are sacredly regarded” as they “are kindly treated well provided for and saved in the scriptural sense.” In describing the encounter, Grant assured Young: “I am satisfied he will not fail to do all in his power to help us in the present cricis of affairs. Indeed he declares that he will never leave us when we are in trouble.”⁴⁷ It may seem improbable that Kane had not believed the widespread rumors of plural marriage. Joseph Smith entered into a short-lived plural marriage in the early or mid-1830s and greatly expanded the practice in the early 1840s; by the mid-1840s, other leading Saints had also begun to practice plural marriage. Polygamy had become something of an open secret at the Mormon camps after

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the expulsion from Nauvoo, at least among the Saints, and nearly all of Kane’s close Mormon associates were polygamists. Even so, Mormons had staunchly denied the existence of polygamy and had hidden its existence from Kane, who had echoed their disavowals to others. Kane was wounded that he had been involved in the Saints’ deception and, in his diary, compared Grant’s admission of polygamy to the “descovery of wife’s infidelity.”⁴⁸ Kane broached the issue with Young nearly a year later. He had considered the Mormons “in the van of Human Progress,” and he “grieve[d] over your favor to a custom” he saw as decidedly antimodern. Kane feared that polygamy could negatively influence “female education, the concord of households, the distribution of family property and the like.” Even so, he intended to continue to defend the Saints and he considered the subject closed. Kane feared that his directness had perhaps irreparably damaged his relationship with the Saints, suggesting his own psychological dependence on the Mormons. When he did not receive a quick answer, he anxiously fretted that they would abandon him. After Young’s response, which thanked him for his frankness and defended the Saints’ constitutional right to practice polygamy, Kane exulted: “Not for nothing, old friend, do men stand by one another through good and evil report for years. Their attachment strikes so deep in time that to get it down you must tear up the Earth with its roots.”⁴⁹ Even with his new knowledge of polygamy, Kane quickly turned to strategy, advising Bernhisel to issue an “Explanation to the Public” to allow the Saints to frame the issue on their own terms before they were forced to admit the practice. Mormon leaders accepted this advice in August 1852, when Apostle Orson Pratt publicly announced the practice of plural marriage. Before this acknowledgment, Kane completed another pamphlet defending the Saints. The former territorial officials had widely publicized their allegations—which focused on Mormon disloyalty to the nation and disrespect for the officials—in newspapers, pamphlets, and a report to Fillmore. Kane and Grant decided to refute the charges in a series of letters to the New York Herald, which would appear under Grant’s name. They realized that polygamy posed the largest obstacle (the “bone in the throat,” in Grant’s words) to improving public opinion. The literary relationship between Kane and Grant was not without its tensions. Kane later recalled his “rough talks” with Grant, and Grant informed Young that Kane was “long winded with the quill, and I give him inspiration, but his stile is long and peculiar.”⁵⁰ Through the persona of Grant, Kane shucked off the constraints of the gentleman writer/lecturer. “I am no gentleman,” Grant announced, “and have had slights enough put upon me, personally, since I came eastward, to entitle me

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to any amount of stand up self-defence.” Freed from the dictates of genteel discourse, Grant and Kane used biting sarcasm, comparing the officials to “just such as you will find keeping tavern together at a railway water station.” The officials had wasted little time in displaying their ineptness and in offending the Mormons through their assumption of superiority. Brandebury became renowned for his refusal to wash his shirt and irritated sensibilities by wooing a thirteen-year-old Mormon girl. Brocchus, the leader of the officials, was a political hack, the kind of man “always ready to hold big men’s horses, and willing to blow their noses all day in the waiting room for the chance.” Upon discovering that the Saints would not send him to Congress, Brocchus fabricated the charges as an excuse to leave, and he inflamed the controversy with his speech. Though James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, published this letter, he also predicted “that the government will yet have some trouble with these Latter Day Saints” and called upon the Saints to submit to the federal authorities “and come down to the established arrangement of one wife at a time, or abide by the consequences.” Although Grant’s letter made a sensation, Bennett refused to print any further letters.⁵¹ Kane and Grant thus decided to write two more letters and published all three as a pamphlet, The Truth of the Mormons, in May 1852. In the final two letters, they rebutted the specific charges and strongly defended Mormon actions. They neither admitted nor denied polygamy, asking, “Suppose I should admit it, Whose business is it? Does the Constitution forbid it?” They took more swipes at the departed officials, joking that they had hoped “by dint of turkey-gobblerish bloating up over the notion of their magnificent titles” to become transformed, “Brocchus an orator, Brandebury knowing something about law, and Harris a six footer of stately port and dignified demeanor.” They also returned to Kane’s theme of suffering by recounting the persecutions in Missouri and Illinois. Murder (including of little children, nursing mothers, and elderly veterans of the American Revolution), rape (with the “family looking on”), and suffering were central experiences in Mormon history. Kane and Grant included appendixes with eyewitness accounts of the murder of Joseph Smith and atrocities against Mormons in Missouri in the 1830s.⁵² The public letters successfully discredited the former officials as derelict “runaways” and changed the public atmosphere. In March 1852, Bernhisel wrote Kane, “Mr Grant’s admirable letter has afforded a great deal of amusement here,” prompting Treasury Secretary Thomas Corwin to remark, “it is the best thing he ever read . . . and that he does not believe a ‘whit’ of the charges.” Bernhisel also learned that it had “produced a salutary effect upon the President’s mind” and that “Brandebury is very wroth about ‘that shirt.’” Kane and Grant

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sent a copy of the pamphlet to each member of Congress and editors throughout the country. One government official told Bernhisel, “Grant’s pamphlet was a perfect tomahawk . . . ‘Brandy’ and ‘that shirt’ have become a by word in this city.” Not amused, a Washington paper declared that the pamphlet “has all the intrinsic evidence of an equivocating, half savage fanatic with a crack in his skull; yet still cunning, vindictive, spiteful, and guilty.” Nevertheless, thanks to Bernhisel’s patient lobbying and the public relations of Kane and Grant, Congress dismissed the officials’ allegations. In the long history of disputes between Mormons and territorial officials, which lasted from the early 1850s into the 1890s, this represented the only significant occasion when the Mormons prevailed in the halls of Congress and in the press.⁵³ Though a temporary victory, this pamphlet also signaled the loss of an important moment in Mormon history. Not until the 1890s would there be as good an opportunity to argue that the Saints could coexist with American society. It also marked a shift in Kane’s tactics to defend the Saints. He told a friend the pamphlet was his “last labor of the kind” and expressed his ambivalence by hiding his participation from Elizabeth, to whom he was now engaged.⁵⁴ While Kane periodically returned to his plan of reshaping the image of Mormonism, his tactics on behalf of the Saints largely shifted from open appeals to the public to backroom political negotiating. Kane’s efforts to alter the Mormon image reveal much about the relationship of reformers, religion, and the nineteenth-century public sphere. First, they complicate the traditional narrative of Mormon history, which has emphasized the intense anti-Mormonism of the era, by demonstrating that during certain periods substantial sympathy for the Saints existed. Print democratized religious polemics, allowing defenders of even the most unpopular religions to reach a wide audience. Thus, the reams of anti-Mormon literature (which have been extensively studied) were counterbalanced by pro-Mormon offerings (which have often been ignored); the Mormon image was not simply imposed, but resulted from a dialogue between the two throughout the century. Indeed, before the public disclosure of polygamy in 1852, a narrative of Mormon suffering competed successfully with the perception of Mormons as dangerous fanatics. Second, the episode reveals much about the interaction of religion and suffering. The repudiation of suffering entered the public sphere in force during this era. For religious groups on the margins of society, like Mormons, claims to victimhood could cut two ways. A marginal group could use the culturally powerful language of suffering to move to the rhetorical center of the nation’s concerns. Kane used the rhetoric of suffering to make a truce between the Saints and the nation conceivable but discovered that this would work only if the Mormons

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played the role of noble victims. The language of suffering could also strengthen the separatist tendencies of marginal groups. The Saints’ participation in the creation of this narrative of victimhood amplified their sense of persecution, which became even more central to Mormon identity and memory, and encouraged the Saints to further separate themselves from the American mainstream. Thus, while Kane’s emphasis on suffering proved successful in temporarily improving the Mormon image, it ironically reinforced the Mormon drive for separatism that in turn helped fuel the Mormon controversy for the rest of the century.

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Free Soil and Young America

During the years in which Kane embarked on his defense of the Latter-day Saints, he also took up the cause of antislavery. In December 1847, he wrote Elisha: “You know the present generation have not come up yet to the questions which interest me. The day of political revolution and reform is nearly ended in our country. The People are victors and have only a detached fortress or two to reduce, a few guerilla parties to gibbet to have peaceful occupation for the future. Social Revolution, social reform will soon begin and then my hand is in, and I have work enough.”¹ Kane and other Democrats viewed the Jacksonian era as ushering in democracy by extending political rights to average white men. The triumph of democracy over entrenched aristocratic interests by his father’s generation allowed Kane to envision a tidal wave of social reform about to sweep the United States. The primary question that interested him, besides the protection of religious liberty, was racial slavery. Kane’s antislavery ideals grew out of a commitment to Jacksonian Democracy, to the idea of a racially pure West open to enterprising white settlers, and to his ethnological investigations. He linked antislavery to a broader political agenda advanced by a group of reforming Democrats known as Young Americans. Deeply influenced by romanticism, Young Americans emphasized the global spread of liberty. Most histories of abolitionism focus on either Conscience Whigs or Garrisonian radicals. By contrast, Kane’s activities illuminate the antislavery Democrats at the center of the political movement to restrict and ultimately end slavery in antebellum America. When Kane wrote of an impending “Social Revolution,” he was busily working to advance a more conventional objective, the presidential prospects of family friend Vice President George Dallas, the heir of the Van Burenite wing of the Democratic Party. He told Elisha, “I am in for him, body and soul, because

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I cannot help myself loving the man as I do.” John and Thomas cowrote a pamphlet, a laudatory campaign biography of Dallas, that “has a wide circulation, and is said to be doing good.” In approaching the question of slavery in the new territories resulting from the Mexican-American War, the key issue of the 1848 race, Dallas articulated the concept of popular sovereignty, that is, allowing the citizens of each territory to vote on the status of slavery. Dallas’s campaign quickly fizzled, however, a victim of the rising political star of Pennsylvania’s other favorite son, James Buchanan. With Dallas removed from the scene, John feared that it would be difficult to find a candidate to “reunite the scattered portions of our party.” When the Democrats nominated Michigan senator Lewis Cass, a northerner known for his support of the South and slavery (a “doughface,” in the era’s terms), antislavery voters faced unacceptable options: Cass or the southern slaveholder Whig Zachary Taylor. Like many other antislavery Democrats, Thomas bolted from the party and joined the fledgling Free Soil movement.² When Thomas developed an antislavery ideology is not clear. In early trips to the South, he found much to like in “this negro tilled Eden” and he considered moving to New Orleans in the mid-1840s. Childhood summers spent with relatives in Virginia exposed Kane to slavery at an early age. In addition, Philadelphia had the highest percentage of free blacks of any large northern city (about 8 percent in 1840), and the Kanes employed black servants. By the 1844 campaign, Kane had begun to gravitate toward the antislavery orbit, opposing the annexation of Texas on antislavery grounds. His embrace of antislavery separated him from most of his family; Elizabeth described him as an “Abolitionist among Pro-Slavery people.” While Pat followed him into an antislavery position, Thomas advised Elisha to avoid the quagmire of sectional politics by refusing to comment on slavery.³ Besides his antislavery convictions, his involvement with the Mormons may have contributed to his disillusionment with the Democratic Party. In 1850, he told Mormon leaders that his association with them had blocked the possibility of a political career. He claimed that Polk in 1846 had given him “carte blanche” to petition on behalf of the Saints. However, the “mixed meanness & malice of others of his adherents caused him to prove faithless to his promises” and “he endeavored to persuade me to go off upon other public service.” Angered, Kane quarreled with Polk and “on one occasion I taxed him openly with falsehood . . . and thus we were at open variance.” Kane credited this experience with permitting him to break party ranks and oppose Cass—“this dear old friend of mine”— during the 1848 presidential canvass.⁴ Most Free Soilers, like Kane, were Democrats frustrated with their party’s in-

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creasingly fervent defense of slavery. Recent historians have generally depicted the Democratic Party as overwhelmingly proslavery and dismissed Democratic antislavery efforts as racist attempts to preserve the political, social, and cultural privileges of whites. More radical abolitionists, particularly those who embraced a vision of an egalitarian racial order, have taken the dominant role in narratives of the antislavery movement. Nevertheless, antislavery Democrats were central to political efforts to limit and eradicate slavery in the antebellum era. During the 1830s, antiabolitionist mobs and controversies over the suppression of abolitionist petitions in Congress and antislavery materials in the mail mobilized some northern Democrats to take an antislavery stand. Disposed to a belief in conspiracies against liberty, these Democrats perceived the threat of a rising aristocratic Slave Power, intent on expanding slavery and encroaching on cherished liberties. In the political events of the 1840s—the defeat of Martin Van Buren by southerners at the 1844 Democratic convention, the annexation of Texas, an increasingly explicit defense by southerners of slavery as socially beneficial— antislavery Democrats saw the Slave Power dominating their party.⁵ The antislavery Democrats at the heart of the Free Soil movement came from outside the culture of evangelical reform, which they associated with “Whiggery, aristocracy, and inequality.” They hailed from areas that had been largely left behind during the market revolution of the early 1800s, passed over by both the economic boom and the main paths of western migration. Whereas “burnedover districts” such as western New York united the market revolution with evangelical revivalism, these “passed-over districts,” including upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania, remained distrustful if not overtly hostile to evangelical reformers and their Benevolent Empire.⁶ Most antislavery Democrats remained traditionally religious, but free thinkers like Kane also found a congenial home in the movement. One crusader, for instance, complained of the evangelical reformers, whose “zeal for the Bible and their religion . . . inculcate[s] their notions [on] people who have not what they consider, the true religion.” Benjamin Tappan, a senator from Ohio and leading antislavery Democrat, rejected the evangelicalism associated with his more famous brothers, Lewis and Arthur, who battled slavery from within evangelical reform culture. Influenced heavily by Enlightenment rationalism, Benjamin dismissed Christianity as “nonsense & absurdity” and denounced all religious leaders as “teachers of hypocrisy.” A strong rejection of clerical involvement in politics and an equally fervent defense of the separation of church and state marked the approach of these Democratic activists.⁷ Antislavery Democrats thus eschewed the language of sin commonly used by evangelical abolitionists and attacked slavery with the rhetoric of Jacksonian

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egalitarianism and fear of aristocratic domination by the Slave Power. Like Benjamin Tappan, they saw their party as the “true antislavery party,” as the “Democratic principle is one of progressive improvement in the condition of the human race.” Democrats placed antislavery within a larger political and reform context, of the protection of liberty and individual enterprise against aristocratic oppression and government interference. They also placed a greater value on direct political action as opposed to persuasion. Benjamin Tappan, for instance, criticized his brother Lewis, who viewed partisan politics as “loathsome,” for refusing to muddy his feet in the impure but necessary political process.⁸ Kane likewise blasted the “New England” approach to abolitionism. Describing himself as a “Democrat and non-Interventionist” who hated “centralism,” he criticized evangelical abolitionists who distinguished “between the sinful and unsinful” rather than “between the lawful and unlawful.” Kane further condemned them for their “awful words of No Communion with slaveholders.” The true “Christian Spirit” would embrace the “erring brother . . . [and] call them back to you as suffering and erring members. . . . But not so the Puritan. His language is Excommunication. . . . Touch him not! Let him be accursed!” This “tone and style,” believed Kane, “will never succeed in the open field of American politics.” Furthermore, while he had doubted the wisdom of annexing Texas in 1844, he later connected evangelical abolitionists with the restriction of territorial expansion, expressing his distaste for those “who opposed the acquisition of Florida and Louisiana, as well as the annexation of Texas and conquest of California.” For Kane, evangelical abolitionists were Puritanical, overreaching, antidemocratic centralists who sought to restrict U.S. expansion.⁹ Democratic antislavery won support throughout the North but found a particularly congenial home in the labyrinthine world of New York politics. The Van Burenite wing of the New York Democratic Party, known as Barnburners against the Hunker (proslavery) faction, included antislavery agitators such as the literary figures William Cullen Bryant and Walt Whitman and politicians Samuel J. Tilden and Preston King. In late 1847, the New York Democratic Party split into rival conventions of Barnburners and Hunkers; both demanded the national party recognize them as the true party representatives. The national convention in 1848 tried to forge a compromise, but when the convention nominated Cass (whom Barnburners blamed for Van Buren’s defeat in 1844), the Van Buren faction left en masse, providing critical numbers for the movement to create an independent Free Soil Party. In Pennsylvania, Free Soil politics were linked with Democratic congressman David Wilmot, representative of a rural district in northeastern Pennsylvania and namesake of the famous Wilmot Proviso, first introduced in 1846, which sought to ban slavery in the territories acquired in

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the war with Mexico. An Episcopalian lawyer in a district largely passed over by the market economy, Wilmot had “pledged his political, religious, and cultural allegiance to an antievangelical Jacksonianism.”¹⁰ In August 1848, twenty thousand Free Soilers—an amalgam of antislavery Democrats, Conscience Whigs, and supporters of the Liberty Party—descended on Buffalo, New York. Compromise between the factions led to the nomination of Democrat Martin Van Buren as president, Whig Charles Francis Adams as vice president, and Liberty influence on the party platform. Kane immersed himself in the movement and became chairman of the Pennsylvania Free Soil Committee. Soon after, he informed Cass that while he remembered his “many courtesies” and highly admired his political career, he was “no longer of the advocates of your election.” Abandoning Cass over slavery, Kane wrote the candidate, had “estranged from me all my party associates and my nearest and dearest relatives.” After receiving a response that demonstrated Cass’s “magnanimity,” Kane assured him, “I am satisfied the efforts of my little party will not prevent your election.”¹¹ In early September 1848, the proponents of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men,” the party’s motto, filled the Chinese Museum in Philadelphia to overflowing. Kane—identified in newspaper reports by his military title of colonel and, probably more importantly, as son of the judge and undoubted Democrat John Kane—advanced to the lectern and presented a series of resolutions that indicate his rationale for supporting antislavery. He emphasized how the nascent party rested its ideology on free labor, which created “personal independence” and led to the “conscious equality of Political Rights.” Thus, to “degrade labor,” as did southern slavery, “is to strike at the vital principle” of republicanism. In short, free labor made possible free government. Kane, like other advocates of Free Soil (and later the founders of the Republican Party), sharply contrasted the North, which celebrated labor and thus protected freedom, with the South, which languished both morally and economically because of slavery. Looking toward the new territories, Kane envisioned that “the free laborers of the United States, and the laborers of Europe” would transform them into “homes of energy, fertility, and freedom.” The expansion of slavery, however, threatened this idyllic vision and would render the territories a “barrier region beyond which the emigration of Free Labor must refuse to penetrate.”¹² Kane also portrayed the movement as essentially conservative, dedicated to the vision of the country’s founders. In claiming the mantle of the revolutionaries, he echoed what nearly every political movement in the nineteenth century, successful or not, proclaimed. Thus, “it was Thomas Jefferson who introduced in 1784 the first Wilmot Proviso, and George Washington who, in 1789,

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gave his Executive sanction to the first laws carrying out the principles of the Free Soil Democrats of 1848.” Kane also argued for the international spread of liberty; since slavery had not existed in Mexico, introducing it into the new territories “would insult that spirit of Freedom which it is our boast among nations to represent.” Like most Free Soilers, Kane stopped short of abolitionism. The original compact that created the federal union protected existing southern slavery from outside interference. In the territories, however, there could be no compromise. Even though Free Soilers initially sought the restriction of slavery in only the territories, most (including Kane) believed that such a step would inevitably doom the institution even in the established South.¹³ As a diverse coalition, Free Soilers shared little beyond a general commitment to the “perpetual exemption” of slavery from the Mexican territories. Kane, however, advanced two other proposals, which grew from both his reforming ideals and his Democratic heritage. First, he seized on the issue of land reform, a favorite of Democratic reformers, and argued that public lands should be sold exclusively “in limited quantities to actual settlers” rather than to large land speculators. Second, Kane argued for a “Right of Education,” meaning the duty of communities to “take all necessary measures” to ensure the “highest moral, physical and intellectual development” of their citizens. The intense reactions to Kane’s resolutions reveal the animosity inspired by the Free Soil movement. Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the North Star, stated that political opponents repeatedly attempted to disturb the meeting. Another antislavery paper reported that a “large majority” of the audience shouted “Aye” to adopt Kane’s resolutions. However, the “‘noes’ were quite noisy and loud,” creating “considerable confusion” before the meeting president declared the resolutions passed.¹⁴ In his role as party chairman, Kane worked to bring nationally recognized Free Soilers, such as Charles Sumner and Salmon Chase, to Pennsylvania to attract publicity and to bolster the party’s credibility. Sumner declined, but offered encouragement: “I rejoice that our cause is at last to find a voice in the city of William Penn, & the home of Franklin.” To Chase, Kane wrote, “We are moving with spirit in Pennsylvania,” and he promised him “audiences worthy [of ] your character and eloquence.” Chase also declined, though he assured Kane that the upcoming election would demonstrate the party’s “indestructible permanence.”¹⁵ While Thomas toiled for Free Soil, his father sought to bring wayward Democrats back to the party fold. Shortly before the election, John exchanged letters with Polk, predicting that Pennsylvania would vote Democratic but expressing his fear that the “Free Soil men of the Whigs will to a great extent desert their candidate, and go for Taylor, while the Democrats of the same creed will

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more generally hold to their ticket.” Polk, a savvy political operator who must have known of Thomas’s role, inquired, “Can nothing be done, during the few days which yet remain to prevent this?” If only the subject could be “presented to them in the proper light,” the Democratic Free Soilers, particularly in the key swing state of Pennsylvania, would refuse to “contribute indirectly” to Taylor’s election. Polk implored John to exercise any influence he might have with Wilmot and other “erring Democratic brethren” (perhaps insinuating Thomas) to encourage them to reunite “with their old party and their old friends.”¹⁶ As shown by Polk’s effort, both northern Democrats and northern Whigs sought to co-opt the issue of slavery restriction. These attempts, combined with the wariness of many potential Free Soil voters (especially Whigs) toward Van Buren, ensured a Free Soil defeat. Though he failed to carry a state, Van Buren received about 10 percent of the national vote, swinging New York to Taylor and Ohio to Cass. Most Free Soil votes came from former Democrats; as Kane observed, the “faithful were recruited in ’48 from the Democratic Ranks.” In spite of Kane’s efforts, the Free Soil movement proved particularly futile in Pennsylvania, as the party did not nominate candidates for state elections, attracted no major leaders, and received a smaller percentage of the vote (about 3 percent and only 1.6 percent in Kane’s Philadelphia) than all but one other northern state. The central role the youthful Kane took illustrates the dearth of more prominent and experienced leaders. Even Wilmot ultimately decided not to leave the Democratic Party, though he campaigned for Van Buren. Local issues, particularly the tariff, proved more salient than antislavery in Pennsylvania politics. Even so, Kane grandiosely (but erroneously) viewed himself as the fulcrum of Cass’s defeat. Notwithstanding his earlier promise to Cass, Kane claimed that his actions swung the Pennsylvania vote to Taylor and the Whigs, ensuring Cass’s demise nationally.¹⁷ Free Soilers remained confident in the face of defeat, believing they had historical momentum on their side. They elected twelve members to Congress, and coalitions with Democrats in Ohio and Massachusetts soon sent leading antislavery agitators Chase and Sumner to the Senate. New York Free Soil congressman Preston King captured the atmosphere when he described the 1848 election as “the Bunker Hill of the moral & political revolution which can terminate only in success to the side of freedom.” Kane, who traveled often during the next few years to press Free Soil issues, wrote in 1850 of “our glorious little band of Free Democrats” in Washington. Association with other soldiers in the antislavery army invigorated Kane: “So fearless, so honest, so independent, so candid, so united, so impracticable! I grieve for the time when success is to make them more as other men are.”¹⁸

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For Kane, the boundaries between Free Soil and the “radical” wing of the Democratic Party initially proved fluid, and he sought common cause with both Free Soilers and antislavery Democrats. He built an alliance with Wilmot, whose famous proviso ensured his prominence as a leading antislavery Democrat. Recognizing Kane’s newspaper ties, Wilmot turned to him for publicity help and advised him on how to foster Free Soil politics. In 1850, Wilmot counseled Kane to not “attempt to hold a Free Soil meeting proper” in Philadelphia, as it “would only result in an Exhibition of our weakness.” Rather, they should await future events to “arouse the people of the free states” and give them “a clearer and stronger sense of the magnitude of the present struggle.” Kane also worked with Wilmot to promote Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania races who would support “some advanced progressive and Radically Democratic measures.” While he remained closer to antislavery Democrats, Kane also associated with antislavery Whigs, classifying some of his “intimate personal friends” as among the “most violent Whigs.”¹⁹ Despite his Free Soil activism and friendliness toward some Whigs, Kane retained some influence within the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. While one of Kane’s Democratic Free Soil associates bitterly complained of the “manner in which I was denounced by certain would be leaders in the Democratic party,” Kane had less difficulty in reentering Pennsylvania Democratic politics, probably because of his family’s influence, and was indeed “petted by some of our old Standard Democrats.” In 1851, Kane continued to “pass muster as a Democrat” and had recently turned down an offer to run for Congress in a district that boasted a “uniformly large Democratic majority.”²⁰ Kane’s involvement in Free Soil fueled his ambivalence about partisan politics and satisfied his taste for iconoclasm. Work for unpopular movements like Mormonism and Free Soil, he reasoned, freed him from the “older Politics.” Given his “naturally Jesuit and gambling disposition, my fondness for scheming and hazard,” he wrote, “I acknowledge with much like thankfulness to my poor God how great an escape I have made from ruin.” In 1851, Kane stated that he had “withdrawn myself almost entirely from the active contests of politics,” as he wanted to “avoid public life entirely, until I can enter upon the career of mature age.” Rather than politics, he viewed his own sphere of action as “the labors of sympathy in the condition of the destitute and degraded poor of our City” as well as “prosecuting my study of the great Social Questions.”²¹ Even with these protests, politics continued to tempt Kane. He resolved to “go on giving my strength to cogging and suckling the clever Northern children of Free Soil,” though he recognized that the party itself would ultimately fail, given its third-party status and its vulnerability to the “reproach of one idea-ism and

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ultraism.” Nevertheless, Kane believed it would “ultimately place its best men in the best commands of both parties to the North.” He thus pledged his future support to the party “whose Radical and Progressive Democracy” would be “most sound & thorough going.” While Kane reconciled himself to the demise of the Free Soil Party, he looked forward to eventual antislavery victory through the mainstream political parties. For Kane, setback seemed only temporary. “Majorities are never the authors of generous deeds,” he believed, and most political change occurred through the efforts of “determined minorities.”²² Kane correctly predicted the fate of the Free Soil Party. After the 1848 election, New York Barnburners, led by Martin Van Buren, soon returned to the Democratic Party. The Compromise of 1850 further disheartened the movement, and most Democrats returned to their former party before the 1852 election. Kane pondered whether to be “without the Party organization altogether” or align himself with one of the mainstream parties. Not even a third party would ensure ideological purity, as the Free Soil platforms had not supported all of his “conscientious views.” While he had allied himself with Whigs like Greeley “for the good cause of Anti Slavery alone,” he parted with them on “Land Reform, Intervention, Postage Revenue & Commercial Questions.” Kane thus opted to work for change from within the Democratic Party, with “its sturdy corps of voters, the same rank & file that since ’76 has always been the main reliance of the country . . . to fight its battles.” Kane thus joined the uneasy procession of antislavery Free Soil Democrats back to the party. Even when the Democratic Party nominated doughfaced Franklin Pierce in 1852, most former Free Soilers, including Kane, remained. The Free Soilers who refused to return to the mainstream parties changed their party name to the Free Democratic in 1852, but internal frictions and a narrower platform led to a substantially weaker showing in the election.²³ Kane’s decision to pursue antislavery from within the Democratic Party strengthened his ties with Young America, a progressive literary and political movement within the party that attained its height in the decade following James Polk’s election in 1844. Young America represented a new kind of Democrat, free of many of the orthodoxies of the Jacksonian era. Certainly, Young Americans retained many key Jacksonian doctrines, including strong support for territorial expansion, political egalitarianism, and social mobility. Unlike older Democrats, though, they embraced the market economy, advocated federal assistance for internal improvements, and emphasized the global spread of liberty. While not all Young Americans accepted antislavery, many promoted the cause within a broader reform agenda.²⁴ A loose coalition, Young America had a variety of leaders, with Senator

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Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois the symbolic head and presidents Polk and Franklin Pierce sympathetic to much of their agenda. Other leaders included newspaper editors, most prominently John O’Sullivan of the Democratic Review and James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald; congressmen, including Wilmot; and an important coterie of senators, both northerners and southerners. George Bancroft, a leading historian and Democratic politician who had met Kane while serving as Polk’s secretary of the navy in 1846, was the intellectual theorist of the Young Americans. Bancroft had a reputation as a reformer (though he opposed antislavery); John Kane deemed him, in words he might have used for his own son at times, “a man of books and impulse, projecting many reforms, some of them impracticable, others absurd, none perfected.” In his vastly popular History of the United States (the first volume was published in 1834, then subsequent volumes and editions appeared throughout the century), Bancroft fused romanticism with Jacksonian democracy. His faith in the people and in America’s democratic institutions meant that the United States would serve as the engine of international democracy. In this romantic view of the nation, Bancroft justified U.S. expansionism, such as the Mexican-American War, as spreading liberty.²⁵ Young Americans viewed reform quite distinctly from their Whig, evangelical counterparts. For Young Americans, reform occurred through the political process, rather than through moral persuasion. God primarily operated not through the reformation of individual souls, but through political decisions voiced by the democratic masses. Young Americans’ reform agenda coalesced around two overarching aims: the removal of barriers to social mobility domestically and the spread of democratic governments globally. They saw the Democratic Party, not Whiggish evangelical forces, as the true vehicle for reform. Kane likewise considered himself “an earnest missionary of Truth and Progress and Reform” and affiliated with the Democratic Party because “all my sympathies [are] with the People and their cause.” Young Americans, like Kane, followed Democratic reformer George Henry Evans by advocating the distribution of frontier lands to settlers by the federal government. In addition, both Kane and other Young Americans sought the expansion of institutions, such as the Smithsonian, that supported the advance of knowledge and scientific exploration. Many also promoted the creation of a federal income tax, the end of dueling, pacifism, the abolition of capital punishment, regulation of monopolies, and the restriction of corrupt political patronage.²⁶ While not racial egalitarians, Young Americans took a more liberal position on ethnic and religious minorities than other Democrats and Whigs. Thus, they sought the rapid integration into American society of European immigrants

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ranging from Irish Catholics escaping the famine to Italians, Germans, and Hungarians fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848. Many even envisioned the integration of Mexicans into American culture following the Mexican-American War. Some, like Kane, also defended religious minorities. For instance, James Gordon Bennett sometimes sympathized with the Latter-day Saints and John O’Sullivan defended Mormon rights in the Democratic Review.²⁷ An international consciousness and a desire to spread liberty throughout the world particularly characterized the Young Americans. Indeed, they initially patterned themselves after democratic movements in Europe, known collectively as Young Europe. In February 1848, a revolt in Paris led to the abdication of King Louis-Philippe, and revolution burned across the continent, spurring the creation of republics or constitutional monarchies in Prussia, the Italian states, and the Hapsburg Empire. Young Americans exulted over the European revolutions, even while many Americans took a more cautious and measured approach. George Bancroft, then serving as minister to England, asked, “Can we show ourselves lukewarm, while the old world is shaking off its chains & emancipating & enthroning the masses?” News of the “hopeful year of 1848” pulled Kane out of one his bouts with depression. He described himself as an “ultra republican”: “My sympathies are with all freedom loving people from Paris to Patagonia.” Kane probably remained in contact with some French republicans he had met earlier, and “letters from France” updated him on the situation. The revolutions passed quickly, however, as by the summer of 1848 a counterrevolution began in earnest; by 1849, the revolutions had failed on a massive scale. Kane looked back wistfully: “In ’48, I, too, was one of the boys.”²⁸ Kane expressed his enthusiasm for the European revolutions through support of Louis Kossuth, the leader of a failed Hungarian revolution that had been crushed after Russian intervention. Nicknamed the “Magnificent Magyar,” Kossuth came to the United States seeking diplomatic and financial support for a new revolution. Americans had followed Kossuth’s fortunes closely, and their initial reception of him in December 1851 was nothing short of hysterical. Some 250,000 people lined the streets of New York City to witness the procession of their hero after his arrival, and “Kossuth mania” swept the nation. For many Americans, Kossuth represented the ideal romantic hero: a freedom fighter with a larger-than-life personality who battled the forces of oppression for his people. A mesmerizing orator, Kossuth urged Americans to adopt a policy of “Intervention for Non-Intervention,” to eschew their traditional isolationism to protect embryonic democracies from intervention by autocratic neighbors and thereby preserve the principle of nonintervention.²⁹ Young Americans led the cheering for Kossuth, and Kane, who found much to

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admire in the frail, short, courageous, and magnetic foreigner, quickly involved himself in creating pro-Kossuth momentum and making arrangements for him to visit Philadelphia. On December 24, 1851, Kossuth received a hero’s welcome in Philadelphia. Flags of Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States draped Independence Hall; a large procession escorted Kossuth through town; and the guest of honor endured numerous speeches, most from leading Democrats such as John Kane and George Dallas. Kossuth responded with a four-hour oration to enlist Philadelphians in his cause.³⁰ Amidst the celebration, Kane perceived the lack of depth in Kossuth’s support, and he worked to “start a quiet political movement in country Pennsylvania, without which all our Philadelphia effervescence will be the merest froth on champagne.” Not coincidentally, he threw himself into the pro-Kossuth movement immediately after learning of Mormon polygamy. He wrote in his diary, “Fortunate Labors to earn forgetfulness.” At a mass meeting in Philadelphia on January 3, 1852, “in favor of affording substantial aid to Hungary,” John presided and Thomas was appointed to the Executive Committee as well as the head of a Committee of Correspondence. Thomas drafted a memorial which urged congressional action by arguing that “the forcible intervention of one State in the internal affairs of another State is in open violation of the public law of the world.” His committee distributed copies of the meeting’s resolutions and organized a petition drive to influence the Pennsylvania senators and congressmen. Kane also engaged in direct fund-raising, listing in his notebook the various donations he collected as well as the substantial opposition he encountered. Some Philadelphians asserted they had “no sympathy for the cause,” wondered “that the People are so humbugged,” and declared, “If there is anything he w[oul]d least like to give to, it is just this concern.”³¹ Averaging “16 hours a day,” his “eyes blue ringed and blood shot” and his “nails grown long,” Kane boasted that his efforts inspired much broader enthusiasm for Kossuth. Nevertheless, the experience again evoked Kane’s deep moral ambivalence about politics, and he asked his friend William Wood to “enjoin me from Politics.” The “excitement of contest,” Kane admitted, led him to engage in unsavory practices; he had been “so tricky, so successful in appeals to mean motives” and had “disguised so much if not perverted the truth.” He groaned, “I am by nature unscrupulous, a low animal cunning, a natural proneness to even unnecessary intrigue and artifice, are among the inherent defects of my character.” His religious unorthodoxy made his situation particularly perilous. He declared, “I am a citizen of no Religious Republic that compels me to observe the specific precepts of a written Law.” To keep his “soul white and conscience

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clean,” particularly since the campaign of 1852 promised to be “one of the vilest in our History,” Kane vowed to steer clear of politics.³² Kossuth’s American support gradually evaporated, a victim of increasing concerns about the practical realities of intervention in Europe, American sectional politics, questions about the murky fate of Kossuth’s money, and dwindling interest. By the summer of 1852, when both political parties explicitly or implicitly repudiated Kossuth and international intervention in their conventions, Kossuth mania had come to an end. Kane, however, continued to see international events through the lens of the expansion of liberty. In an 1853 visit to the West Indies, he looked on the “fair land” as an “American Annexationist,” likening his experience “as a man looks upon a woman for the first time when he knows he is going to own her.” The following year, he supported a war to obtain Cuba from Spain, a cause normally associated with southerners looking to expand slavery’s empire. Young Americans viewed Cuba through the twin issues of the spread of republican governments (support for Cuban rebels against despotic Spain) and territorial expansion. They even used antislavery arguments to call for the acquisition of Cuba as a way to suppress the international slave trade. Unconvinced, his wife Elizabeth complained that while “honorable men like my darling believe it to be justifiable,” they only did so by “shutting one’s eyes steadfastly to . . . their own interests.”³³ While territorial expansion generally united the Democratic Party, sectionalism always boiled right below the surface of intraparty politics. Schism again threatened following Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s proposal of the KansasNebraska Act in January 1854. Douglas’s bill created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and allowed the settlers to vote on whether to allow slavery. Many Democrats, like Douglas, viewed popular sovereignty as the fulfillment of the Democratic dogmas of local government and self-rule. Other northern Democrats, like Kane, accused Douglas of pandering to the South, warned about the extension of slavery and its threat to white settlement, and blasted the bill for overturning the Missouri Compromise of 1820.³⁴ After the Senate passed the bill in early March, Kane joined a bipartisan movement that protested loudly against the Kansas-Nebraska Act to persuade the House of Representatives to kill it. He organized an anti-Nebraska meeting in Philadelphia, arranging for Mayor Charles Gilpin (a Whig) to preside. Senator Salmon Chase, the national leader of the anti-Nebraska Democrats, praised Kane’s efforts, though both viewed their political alliance with Whigs with suspicion. Despairing, Chase wrote Kane, “Old line Democracy is wormeaten at the core—Old Whigism never had a core,” and he hoped that a “living,

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progressive Democracy” would yet arise to challenge the Nebraska bill. Kane responded: “It is a great pity that we have had to get up our Nebraska Meeting through the Whigs; but I tried the Democrats faithfully first. Anything in the way of Movement just now is better than Quiet.” Not all antislavery Democrats agreed. William Wood regretted Kane’s reliance on Whigs, who had no concern for the “poor slaves,” but only hoped to “make political capital” against the Democratic Party.³⁵ The anti-Nebraska movement failed to gain much traction in Philadelphia. One local paper reported “the attendance was not very large” at Kane’s meeting. Overoptimistically, Chase credited the meeting and similar “popular demonstrations” throughout the North with delivering “stunning blows” that left the bill in a “paralytic condition.” Kane returned the praise, prematurely predicting that history would record that Chase almost single-handedly defeated the “disgraceful Nebraska Bill.” The bill passed in May, and the Democratic Party never recovered from the schism it created. The congressional votes reveal the rift within the northern Democratic Party. In the Senate, northern Democrats, led by Douglas, supported the bill by a margin of fifteen to five, but northern Democrats in the House of Representatives split evenly, with forty-four opposed and forty-four in favor. Northern voters punished those Democrats who voted for the bill, and only five of the forty-four pro-Nebraska Democrats returned to the House in the next session. For most antislavery Democrats, the bill meant the end of their association with their party, and the Republican Party coalesced over the next few years, with former Democrats joining northern Whigs.³⁶ Kane, however, continued to fight for his Free Soil principles from within the Democratic Party. The week after the bill’s passage, Kane told editor and party insider John W. Forney that while he remained “as fanatic as ever—in fact as much as ever a domestic traitor and incendiary,” he loved “my country and our dear old Democratic party” and would spring to the defense of either. The abandonment of the Democratic Party by antislavery leaders and voters left Kane more than ever on the party fringes. Even as the Pierce administration declared support for the Kansas-Nebraska Act a test of Democratic orthodoxy, Kane participated in efforts to flood Kansas with northern antislavery migrants.³⁷ Frustrated by the hardening of proslavery orthodoxy within the Democratic Party, Kane reflected on why Americans, and in particular Democrats, opposed abolitionism. In some respects, he admitted, antislavery seemed to be on the rise, as it had attracted the literary elite and the “philosophers and college men,” as well as “every clever adapter of transatlantic literature on the market, all the best preachers and the makers of patent school-books, finally, Mr. Emerson, the Tribune, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Nevertheless, Kane recognized that

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racial attitudes, some of which he shared, explained the weakness of antislavery within the Democratic Party. White Americans had “no idea whatever of fraternity or equality with individuals of an inferior or reputed inferior race.” Rather, white America “invades Mexicans, proscribes Chinese, exterminates American Aborigines of all varieties and wherever it can find them: what has it to say with respect to Negroes?” The Democratic reliance on poor urban immigrants also reinforced proslavery sentiment within the party. Kane argued that ethnic immigrants, generally on the same plane with free blacks, distinguished themselves from blacks through racism. Elites like himself had no fear of “entangling alliance with those we call socially our inferiors,” but the poor faced “the dangers of familiar intercourse with those no poorer than himself.” Catholic immigrants who arrived “free from prejudice” thus quickly learned American bigotry in northern cities. The same pattern held true for the South, as the “nonslaveholding whites” were “more violent against white abolitionists than any of the aristocracy whose privileges they uphold.”³⁸ In an attempt to create a broader Free Soil constituency within the Democratic Party, Kane penned a lengthy essay in 1855, during the jockeying in Kansas between proslavery and antislavery forces, titled “The Africanization of America.” His manuscript, apparently intended for publication, had both political and scientific purposes, as he engaged with ethnological questions about the nature of race. Reflecting contemporary racial science, Kane warned of the evils of racial amalgamation and argued that only Free Soil policies would ultimately protect Americans against racial mixing. Slavery, on the other hand, promoted promiscuity between masters and slaves, bringing the curse of racial intermixture on the United States. By using many of the same assumptions of proslavery apologists—in particular, racial ethnology, the dread of racial mixing, and the need to protect the liberty of white people—Kane sought to persuade other Democrats to support Free Soil politics.³⁹ The antebellum era witnessed the rise of an “American school” of ethnology that brought the scientific investigation of race into the mainstream of American thought. Enlightenment philosophers and Christian theologians had traditionally emphasized the unity of humanity and explained racial differences through environmental influences. By contrast, in the 1840s and 1850s, most American scientists became convinced of the innate physiological differences between the races, which provided scientific grounding for the belief in white superiority. Samuel George Morton, a prominent Philadelphia scientist whose circle of acquaintances overlapped with the Kanes’, emerged as the foremost American ethnologist after the publication of his Crania Americana (1839), a study of the skulls of American Indians that argued for the diversity of races.

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Throughout the 1840s, the theory of fundamental racial divisions gained support in the United States, promulgated by the American school of ethnology, which included southern doctor and writer Josiah C. Nott, Egyptologist and showman George R. Gliddon, and Swiss-born scientist Louis Agassiz. In 1854, Nott and Gliddon popularized this line of thought in their internationally renowned Types of Mankind, which quickly became the “standard scientific explanation of racial origins and distinctiveness” until supplanted by the theories of Charles Darwin. American ethnologists argued that racial intermixture not only produced weak and often infertile individuals, but also wreaked havoc on the individual, the future of the race, and society in general. Kane used this same logic to attack the expansion of slavery from within the ethnology hailed by proslavery apologists.⁴⁰ Kane considered himself a gentleman scientist in an age before the professionalization of science, when amateurs were still accepted in leading scientific circles and sometimes made significant contributions. As such, he made “three different tours” to the Caribbean to study slavery and the results of emancipation. While these voyages had other purposes—two to recover health and a third to nurture his dying older brother—Kane also “devoted his attention to original ethnological research among the recently imported Africans.”⁴¹ Kane first visited the West Indies in 1839 or 1840, primarily for health reasons. He returned from January to March 1853, both for his health (which he had overtaxed caring for his dying younger brother Willie) and for ethnological studies. As during his European visits, health crises ironically punctuated a journey designed to foster health, and he complained of seasickness, head and neck aches, “heat quick pulse & parching thirst.” Kane again considered death a real possibility and scrawled a note to his family banning clergy from his funeral and assuring them that if there were an afterlife, he would “seek out” Willie. “But I believe in None.” However, the crisis passed, and he exulted, “you will hardly know me when I return.”⁴² As his health recovered, Kane focused more on ethnological questions. He listed a number of topics in his journal, presumably to guide his studies, including the “Working & Punishment of Females,” the “Effects from Elective Franchise,” demographic questions, crime statistics, and the state of the mulatto. In his travels, Kane particularly noticed mixed-race associations and marriages. In the Bahamas, he disapprovingly recorded that inhabitants of all races “go to Government Balls, Schools, Churches & Communion Tables together undistinguished.” In his journal, he characterized racially mixed individuals as “red blood stained, yellow gold stained, black negro stained,” the result of the “Crime

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of all nations.” Such a person was “English Cupidity French Lust & Spanish Cruelty all mingled in one devilish being.”⁴³ Two years later, he again expounded on the consequences of racial mixing in his “Africanization of America.” The effects of slave emancipation, he wrote, had completely changed the West Indies since his first visit, when he had been so “handsomely entertained” by the “old planters.” “The Island,” Kane lamented, “has changed hands.” The contrast was stark: sugar and coffee estates abandoned, roads unrepaired, bridges broken down, mansions ruined. The difference in the inhabitants themselves—the result of the “loathsome process of Amalgamation”—struck him even more forcefully. Within two decades, Kane groaned, “you will not be able to collect a church full of pure whites in all the island.” Even in elite circles, “Your white hostess presents you to whites and mesties alike, without a change of countenance.” Worse yet, racial calamity threatened the United States, though Kane noted that crucial differences existed between the American South and the West Indies. During the colonial era, southerners immigrated with families, which ensured social disapproval for interracial relationships. Nonresident planters, however, cursed the West Indies, and the almost exclusively male settlers “lived the life of a beast,” as the “pettiest Clerk, Bailiff, or Attorney could afford himself the gratification of his animal appetites.”⁴⁴ Unlike some contemporary ethnologists like Josiah Nott who lumped all blacks into one race, Kane argued that they in fact belonged to “various and different races.” The “uneducated American” would be surprised “to be carried over to Senegambia or Guinea and shown some of the races there, whom he thinks he despises.” The Mandingos, for instance, were “enterprising merchants, tall, straight-limbed fellows, often with the handsomest features,” as well as “zealous” Muslims. To Kane’s chagrin, however, most American blacks traced their ancestry not to these nobler races of Africa, but to “inferior” races and undesirables in “decent black societies”: “family paupers, half witted and mischievous persons . . . a few heretics and rebels, and offenders against the law; but more than any thing else, perhaps, incorrigible thieves.” Kane shuddered over the possibilities of racial mixing between white Americans and the descendants of this hodgepodge of Africans. Certainly, he abhorred slavery—he termed the slave trade the “most gigantic crime of Christendom”—and he spoke sympathetically of the plight of slaves. Even so, he thought racial amalgamation would “result in a signal and disastrous deterioration” of whites. In his own travels, he had never seen the “inferior, mentally, morally, and physically, of the offspring of the ‘Poor white man’ of the Southern States, and the veritable low field Negro,” who were “remarkably sensual, dishonest, or sickly.” “You are never safe with your mix-

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ture,” Kane argued. “It is never to be trusted.” Indeed, he would prefer his “name should die out forever” than that his children “should ally themselves with individuals having the slightest taint” of non-European blood.⁴⁵ Kane saw three alternative solutions to the “great Negro Question” the United States would face after the end of slavery: “Fusion: Extermination: or Transportation.” Clearly, the first two options were unacceptable. Kane thus favored a mix of compensated emancipation, colonization of freed slaves, and restriction of slaves and free blacks from the western territories. Economics would gradually render slavery unsustainable, but he worried that this would lead to “Poverty Emancipation,” which would harm both masters and slaves. “In our hostility to Slavery,” he lectured, “we succeed in forgetting the slaves.” Paid emancipation would humanely reduce the suffering of slaves. Elizabeth recorded that her husband “made a number of trips South for the purpose of pleading with distinguished Slaveholders” to accept a plan of gradual, compensated emancipation. Kane also looked to colonization and argued that earlier attempts had failed “because but one Africa was open . . . the West Indies were fortresses of Slavery, and all America south of the Gulf of Mexico a sealed book.” “Little Africas” now dotted the Caribbean and Latin America, beckoning America’s freed slaves.⁴⁶ Most crucially, Kane argued for the restriction of blacks, “bond or free,” from the territories to ensure a racially pure West. The question of settlement of the territories would reverberate for “hundreds of ages,” dwarfing the other topics over which politicians and reformers wrangled. Demographic trends, particularly the high birthrates of blacks, made the problem even more pressing. While slavery “may or must soon die,” the United States would be left with four million “Descendants of African Barbarians,” enough “to give us all a sixth,—a perceptible tinge,—of their black blood.” In settling the West, Americans faced a distinct choice: “We may leave it to our children a true plantation of Eden:—we may sow it with tares.” The western territories must be preserved for liberty-loving white settlers, not “human wolves, and human dogs and hyenas.” For Kane, as for most Americans, the debate over Kansas fundamentally revolved around the “fate of white men’s liberty in the republic.” He thus marshaled contemporary science and the fear of racial mixing, the same tools proslavery forces used, to argue for the creation of a free Kansas.⁴⁷ Agitation in “Bleeding Kansas” increased sectional tensions in both the nation and the Democratic Party for the remainder of the decade, prompting an exodus of northern antislavery Democrats from their party. Kane, however, remained a Democrat until during the Civil War. A number of factors influenced his decision. George Q. Cannon, one of Kane’s closest Mormon friends,

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informed Brigham Young in 1859 that Kane had not yet joined the Republican Party, where all his “sympathies run,” solely to retain his influence with President James Buchanan, a Democrat, and “thereby have more power to aid us.” While probably a factor, Cannon’s explanation ignored other potential reasons for Kane’s reluctance to break with the Democrats, including his family’s political heritage. In addition, Kane’s political activity, with the exception of his Mormon-related lobbying, declined during the 1850s, as he began a family and pursued new business ventures.⁴⁸ A lingering commitment to Young America also may have influenced Kane’s plans. In pondering his relationship with the Democratic Party after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he indicated that international issues would “exert a controlling influence with me.” Kane’s self-identification in 1858 as a “Douglasite,” notwithstanding Stephen A. Douglas’s sponsorship of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, also suggests his continuing ideological ties to Young America. In late 1858, Kane met with Buchanan’s attorney general, Jeremiah Black, a fellow Pennsylvanian, who urged Kane to become more involved in Pennsylvania politics. Kane could “rally the party—rally the State—and place himself at the head of it.” Black suggested that John Kane, who had died nine months earlier, “would most probably have been named for next President” had he lived. Besides the family name, Thomas had other crucial attributes that qualified him to be “Head of the Party”: he refused electoral office, his absence in Utah earlier that year left him “unpledged to any set of measures,” and he had a “wonderful personal influence.” Kane, however, refused Black’s entreaties.⁴⁹ Kane’s decision to remain within the Democratic Party demonstrates that at least some antislavery Democrats continued to fight for the containment of slavery in a party that became increasingly hostile to their views. While a definite minority, antislavery agitators had their place in the party; even in the late 1850s, fervent opposition to slavery did not warrant excommunication from the Democratic Party. As Black’s proposal indicates, party leaders saw Kane as a loyal Democrat. Although Kane was slower to leave the party than most antislavery reformers, his political journey nevertheless represents a broader group of activists indigenous to the Democratic Party and fundamental to the development of political responses to slavery during the antebellum era. These Democratic reformers positioned themselves against the evangelical culture of reform that also produced much of the era’s opposition to slavery. They sometimes entered into political coalitions with evangelical reformers, as in the Free Soil Party and the resistance to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Nevertheless, these Democratic activists battled the Slave Power from a distinct perspective, which used the language of

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Jacksonian democracy, sought to protect the racial purity of the western territories, and placed antislavery within the context of the Young America romantic vision of the global spread of liberty. Kane was a well-connected insider, and most of his advocacy of Free Soil principles took place behind the scenes, organizing meetings, plotting strategy, perhaps writing anonymously. Even so, the politics of slavery, in particular the heated debate over the Fugitive Slave Law, thrust the Kane family—especially John and Thomas—onto a national stage.

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During the 1850s, controversies over the Fugitive Slave Law, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, rocked the nation. Dramas involving the law played out in federal courts across the North, with several of the most heated legal disputes occurring in the Independence Hall courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge John Kane, with Thomas as his clerk. The events inside his courtroom reverberated nationally and were closely watched by all sides of the emerging sectional conflict. The debate over the Fugitive Slave Law, which required northerners to participate actively in the return of escaped slaves to the South, also divided the Kane family. Hostile toward abolitionism, John strictly upheld the law, earning the appreciation of southerners and the vilification of many northerners. Thomas, however, acted to undermine his father’s authority and to subvert the law. Pat followed Thomas’s lead in allying himself with the abolitionist foes of his father’s interpretation of the law. The private family disagreement quickly turned public and became part of the larger national debate over fugitive slaves. The dispute between the Kanes illuminates the divide within the northern Democratic Party over slavery. Though John hoped that his grandchildren would see the end of slavery, his desire to preserve sectional unity and demonstrate northern commitment to the Compromise of 1850 represented the mainstream of the party in the North. The actions of Thomas and Pat, by contrast, highlight the antislavery wing of the Democratic Party, reminders that not all northern Democrats supported the party line on slavery.¹ The Fugitive Slave Law thus revealed and exacerbated family, partisan, and sectional divisions. Passed as the final piece of the Compromise of 1850, the law ironically ensured that the great compromise would only aggravate the crisis

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over slavery. The very nature of the legislation virtually guaranteed continued disputes. Northern critics charged that the structure of the law favored the return of alleged fugitives, as it denied them a jury trial, the right to a writ of habeas corpus, and the right to testify on their own behalf. Instead, a federal judge or a court-appointed commissioner would render verdicts on whether to return a fugitive. Furthermore, a commissioner could demand that any northerner participate in a fugitive-hunting posse. Northerners who aided a fugitive slave faced stiff penalties, imprisonment for up to six months, and a fine of up to one thousand dollars. Finally, a commissioner received ten dollars if he returned the fugitive to slavery and five dollars if he freed the alleged slave. While supporters of the legislation cited the need for extra paperwork in cases of extradition, opponents viewed the extra five dollars as a transparent bribe.² Throughout the 1850s, one fugitive slave case after another gripped the country, continual irritants in the nation’s festering sectional wounds. The controversy indicates the crucial role the border regions of the South played in the battles over slavery. Many southerners feared the weakening of slavery in the border South, as upper South masters sold their slaves to the lower South in large numbers in the decades leading up to the Civil War, a process historians have called the Second Middle Passage. Even more dangerous in the eyes of proslavery advocates was the constant stream of fugitives from the upper South into states immediately across the Mason-Dixon line, making Pennsylvania one of the key areas of dispute. By fleeing the South, fugitives not only sought personal liberty, but also placed the issue of slavery squarely on the nation’s agenda. A mix of factors made the controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law particularly toxic for sectional relations: the role fugitives played in southerners’ fears over the weakening of slavery in the upper South, the central place of escaped slaves in abolitionist propaganda, and northerners’ increasing resentment of southern encroachments on cherished liberties. The fugitive slave trials both drew on and subsequently reinforced these factors and played a significant role in the coming of the Civil War.³ Signed into law by President Millard Fillmore on September 18, 1850, the new law immediately created controversy. Most white northerners, particularly outside of New England, originally took an acquiescent approach (though fugitive slave trials gradually rendered the act increasingly unpopular in the North). Many northern blacks, however, immediately fled for Canada, while others lived under a constant fear of recapture. Others, both black and white, organized to resist the law. Dramatic rescues of fugitives from federal authorities—particularly of Shadrach Minkins in Boston in February 1851 and William “Jerry” Henry in Syracuse, New York, in October 1851—underscored the strong opposition to the

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law among segments of the North’s population. The escapes of a few arrested fugitives, however, proved the exception. Over the course of the decade, at least 298 fugitives were returned, while 23 either escaped or were rescued after their capture, and only 11 were freed by federal authorities.⁴ The Fugitive Slave Law required U.S. commissioners, a position Thomas held along with his judicial clerkship, to perform a central legal role in capturing and extraditing fugitives, so upon the law’s passage, Thomas noisily resigned his lucrative position. Southern newspapers railed against him. To his sister Bessie, Thomas wrote, “I have received another complimentary newspaper from the South, in which, with reference to our Father’s pro-slavery Democracy—I am called a renegade to my parents Faith.” By contrast, the Pennsylvania Freeman, an abolitionist paper, declared in an article titled “Manly”: “We learn with pleasure that Col. Thomas L. Kane of this city promptly resigned his office of United States Commissioner, on receiving information of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill . . . declaring his belief that ‘no honorable man can longer hold the office.’ The act is worthy of his heart, and will be honored by every man who can appreciate a noble deed.”⁵ Judge Kane saw no nobility in the deed, ruling Thomas’s strident letter of resignation in contempt of court and sentencing him to prison (though it is unclear whether Thomas actually served time behind bars). John’s decision was appealed to Robert C. Grier, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and a fellow Pennsylvania Democrat. Grier’s judicial district included Pennsylvania, making him John Kane’s immediate superior and close colleague; like Kane, Grier strongly supported the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Even so, he overruled Kane’s decision. The private interaction between father and son over the verdict remains murky. One of Thomas’s close friends, his future father-inlaw William Wood, reconciled the news by supposing that John had “calmly and sadly” bowed to judicial duty by “sentencing you to 1 year in the States Prison.” Even so, Wood assumed, “as a Father his heart exulted, that you were a worthy (though as he thought mistaken) sufferer for conscience sake and for the good old cause of civil and religious liberty.”⁶ Thomas’s high-profile resignation earned him the attention and respect of national abolitionists. Four years later, during a heated dispute over the fate of a fugitive slave in Boston (Anthony Burns), Wendell Phillips denounced Commissioner Edward Greely Loring (whom abolitionists placed in the same category as Judge Kane). Phillips called for Loring’s impeachment, declaring, “Could he not have resigned, as many, young Kane of Philadelphia, and others, did, when first the infamous act made it possible that he should be insulted by an application for such a warrant?” Thomas received private praise as well. After reading

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, Wood’s daughter Elizabeth (by then Thomas’s fiancée) joked that she was “very much ashamed” of him: “Giving up your Commissionership, and disobeying the Fugitive Slave Law! You are not fit to be a citizen of these United States, where such things take place.” Such accolades fed Thomas’s own sense of himself as a martyr for conscience sake.⁷ Notwithstanding Thomas’s resignation, the Fugitive Slave Law continued to define the Kanes’ relationship with abolitionism and with each other, as a steady stream of alleged fugitives appeared before Judge Kane (with Thomas acting as clerk). The location of the courtroom, the second floor of Independence Hall, was pregnant with symbolism of liberty and slavery. Black Philadelphians noted the irony that an escaped slave could be sent back to slavery “within sight of the hall where independence was declared.” Fugitive slave cases in Philadelphia were decided either by a specially appointed commissioner, Edward D. Ingraham (whom abolitionists perceived as pro-southern), or by federal judges Kane or Grier (or, in significant cases, by both). The cases invariably attracted crowds and controversy.⁸ Soon after Thomas’s resignation as commissioner, in October 1850, John Kane and Grier faced the first case in Philadelphia under the new law when an alleged fugitive, Henry Garnet, was apprehended. Garnet, then about twenty-seven years old, had escaped from his master in Cecil County, Maryland, eight years before. His arrest “caused an immense sensation” among Philadelphia’s black community and “awakened many fugitive slaves to a sense of their true position.” Kane and Grier jointly petitioned President Fillmore for federal troops to assist in enforcing the new law in cases of emergency. Given the potential for civil unrest, Fillmore agreed, but “only in the last resort.” Garnet was represented by four abolitionist attorneys, including Pat Kane. The prosecution made several key mistakes and received a lecture from Grier that the court was “disposed to give justice as well to the master as to the slave—but the master must prove his case to the very letter.” Garnet was thus freed to the “most boisterous cheering” and “borne off the ground with incredible speed.” With this initial case, judges Kane and Grier established their intention to execute the letter of the law and to use all necessary force to aid in its enforcement.⁹ Following Garnet’s case, a succession of fugitive slaves appeared before John Kane in 1851. In some cases, he released alleged fugitives. In February 1851, for instance, Euphemia Williams, a mother of six children, was alleged to be a Maryland slave by the name of Mahala who had escaped in 1829. Thomas wrote to his sister that he had to attend the “baiting [in Court] of a female negro our hounds caught yesterday a little after daybreak.” He described the courtroom scene: “today’s game will be more interesting owing to the presence of five of her

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pups that utter cries after the manner of their kind.” John determined that Williams was not the slave Mahala and ordered her release. Hundreds of free blacks accompanied a carriage carrying Williams and her children to their house (the most enthusiastic relieved the horses of their duty and pulled the carriage themselves): “The whole scene was one of wild, ungovernable excitement, produced by exuberance of joy.”¹⁰ Abolitionist approval of Judge Kane was short-lived. In March, he returned a pregnant fugitive, Hannah Dellam, to slavery, along with her son. In a letter to Horace Greeley, Thomas criticized the “Slave Hunt” and wrote that during the capture, Dellam’s ten-year-old son “stood at bay, called bad names, avowed his adherence to the Higher Law—Sentiment of Liberty or Death, and flourished about so fiercely with a small bladed penknife that the Police Force had to run in together and throw him down to take him. At least a dozen men—against One Boy 10 years old!” Thomas, who often equated manliness with brash gestures of physical courage, wrote, “Put him down as the first black Man of Pennsylvania.” By contrast, Dellam was a pitiable sight, as the ordeal made the “poor creature” experience “pains which she mistook for those of premature labor.” Abolitionists hotly contested Dellam’s identity, but John ruled that the claimants had provided sufficient proof and ordered her return. The decision enraged Philadelphia’s free black community, and police arrested some dozen armed blacks after they refused to disperse.¹¹ John’s initial decisions, which both freed some alleged fugitives and returned others to slavery, did not seem to foreshadow his eventual role in abolitionist propaganda as a judge subservient to the Slave Power. He envisioned himself as honorably carrying out his judicial duties, deciding each case on its merits, and he expressed pleasure at the peaceful enforcement of the law in Philadelphia. He wrote Elisha, then on his first Arctic voyage, that the law “has given rise to much squabbling in the north & middle; but, except in the case of one rescue at Boston made by a small mob of negroes against a pack of cowardly police, it has been faithfully executed. In Pennsylvania it has been carried out firmly and honestly.”¹² A few months later, John faced a much greater challenge to ensure that the law was “carried out firmly and honestly.” Soon after the passage of the law, William Wood had mused to Thomas, “It will be an interesting case, when the first escaped slave shoots his captor.” On September 11, 1851, a Maryland slave owner, Edward Gorsuch, assisted by a few southerners and local officials, tried to seize four escaped slaves at Christiana, Pennsylvania, after securing a warrant for their arrest as fugitives. The black community violently resisted the attempt, resulting in the death of Gorsuch and injury of his son. Enraged southerners de-

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manded justice, and Castner Hanway, a white miller who had been on the scene of the clash, was arrested along with four other whites and thirty-six blacks for treason, making it the largest treason case in the nation’s history. The resulting trial, widely viewed as a “test case for the Compromise of 1850,” quickly became a cause célèbre. According to one historian, “no other fugitive episode struck the raw nerve of Southern honor so painfully or had the same impact on public opinion throughout the nation.”¹³ Judge Kane quickly angered abolitionists with his strict instructions to the grand jury convened to decide on indictments. He equated abolitionist rabblerousing with treason, decrying those who had sought to “inflame the minds of the ignorant by appeals to passion, and denunciations of the law as oppressive, unjust, revolting to the conscience, and not binding on the actions of men.” Antislavery agitators, he charged, had under a “mask of conscience or of peace” incited others to violence and then had “withdrawn themselves to await the explosion they had contrived.” What abolitionists, including his sons, saw as legitimate civil disobedience (or even free speech), Kane condemned as treason. Under these instructions, the grand jury issued forty-one indictments for treason. However, the black men most directly culpable, those who had fired on the slave-catching posse, had successfully fled to Canada. The trial of Hanway, whom the prosecution falsely believed to be a Quaker abolitionist and the leader of the conspiracy, began on November 24, 1851, presided over jointly by Kane and Grier.¹⁴ Notwithstanding his position as clerk of his father’s court, Thomas publicly supported the prisoners. He cast the trial in biblical terms, with the federal government and the slave catchers in the role of Goliath and the defendants and abolitionists as the seemingly outmatched but eventually triumphant David. William Still, a prominent Philadelphia black abolitionist, remembered that Thomas showed the prisoners “tokens of kindness and marks of Christian benevolence.” On Thanksgiving, Thomas provided the prisoners with “six superior turkeys, two of them extra size, together with a pound cake, weighing 16 pounds.” The white prisoners dined “in appropriate style in the room of Mr. Morrison, one of the keepers,” joined by a federal marshal, several other jailors, and Philadelphia’s mayor.¹⁵ In the heightened atmosphere, Thomas’s Thanksgiving dinner became a highly charged political act. The abolitionist press praised him and referred to the public rift between father and son. The Pennsylvania Freeman queried, “Who will stand the best with posterity—the father who prostitutes his powers as a Judge to procure the conviction of peaceable citizens as traitors for refusing to aid in the capture of fugitive slaves, or the son who ministered to the wants of

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those citizens while incarcerated in a loathsome prison?” Frederick Douglass’s newspaper opined, “We doubt if any member of the administration which is seeking their lives, had a better relish for Thanksgiving dinner than these poor prisoners.” While the abolitionist press used Thomas to condemn his father, the open association of the judge’s son and clerk with the prisoners fed southern suspicions of a northern conspiracy to preclude an impartial trial. In their own eyes, the prosecuting attorneys and their southern supporters were treated like pariahs while the prisoners were honored as heroes. Robert J. Brent, Maryland’s attorney general and a member of the prosecution’s team, complained about the dinner to the court. Grier slammed the Freeman’s account, calling “their praise of a person . . . the highest vituperation, and their slander the greatest benefit.” According to Still, Brent thus “received a few crumbs of sympathy.” Even so, Still remarked, “the dinner had been so handsomely arranged, and coming from the source that it did, it had a very telling effect.”¹⁶ The family’s public rift widened when Pat, then twenty-four years old and a local officer of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, was retained as one of several attorneys for the black prisoners. Still lauded Pat for bringing “great zeal, high attainments, large sympathy and true pluck, while, in view of all the circumstances, the committee of arrangements felt very much gratified to have him in their ranks.” One suspects, as Still hinted, that the more experienced abolitionist lawyers on the defense team, which featured some of Pennsylvania’s leading attorneys, including Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, probably found Pat at least as valuable for public propaganda as for his legal skills.¹⁷ Thomas retained contact with leading abolitionists during the trial. Greeley confided to him: “I want some of the Christiana prisoners convicted of treason. The influence on the sentiment of the country must be to tolerance.” Greeley wanted Fillmore “compelled either to hang some of them or commute their sentences. Either will blast him, and will do good to the cause of Liberty.” Thomas wrote to Senator Charles Sumner about “this miserable trial,” reassuring him of the weakness of the prosecution’s case: “I have no doubt of Hanway’s acquittal.” He told his antislavery friend William Wood, “This Treason Prosecution has been a miserable Persecution,” and assured him, “the jury is with us.” Thomas correctly divined the result of the trial. In his final instructions to the jury on December 11, Grier stated that the defendant had been proved “guilty of riot and murder.” However, the federal court could only find Hanway guilty of treason; on this count, Grier indicated, the prosecution had failed to show a “previous conspiracy to make a general and public resistance to any law of the United States.” After fifteen minutes of deliberation, the jury delivered their decision of “not guilty.”¹⁸

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Abolitionists celebrated the verdict as well as the subsequent decision by the federal government not to pursue trials for treason against any of the other defendants. While the trial emboldened abolitionists to even greater defiance of the law, the verdict infuriated southerners and weakened the delicate political compromise that had briefly promised a peaceful resolution to the fugitive controversy. If no one could be prosecuted for the murder of a slave owner who had tried to retrieve his property with a valid warrant and assisted by federal authorities, southerners fumed, then the Fugitive Slave Law was a dead letter in much of the North.¹⁹ Even with the acquittal, John’s actions quickly transformed him into one of the most visible and controversial figures in the sectional debate over fugitive slaves. The abolitionist press ravaged him; the Pennsylvania Freeman accused John of “transcending his official obligations and seeking to appease the Moloch of the South by a voluntary offering upon its bloody altar,” actions that would ensure “the censure of his contemporaries and the indignation of posterity.” William Lloyd Garrison criticized John for doing “his best to convict Castner Hanway of treason in connection with a fugitive-slave case in which the enemies of freedom were shot down by the lovers of it—though not by this Quaker defendant.” Sumner told Thomas that John’s “name is now connected with a deed of infamy which will not soon be forgotten.”²⁰ Four years later, the Kanes found themselves once again at the center of a bitter conflict over the Fugitive Slave Law. On July 18, 1855, Passmore Williamson, a friend of Thomas and a Quaker who served as secretary of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, helped free three slaves belonging to John H. Wheeler, the U.S. minister to Nicaragua, who was passing through Philadelphia on his way to New York to return to his post. Williamson and a group of free blacks led by William Still boarded Wheeler’s steamer and told his three slaves, Jane Johnson and her two children, that they were free under Pennsylvania law. Wheeler claimed that when he tried to intervene, the blacks “seized me by the collar, threatened to cut my throat if I resisted, took the servants by force, they remonstrating and crying murder.” Williamson then presented the distressed diplomat with his business card and informed Wheeler that he would accept personal responsibility for any legal claims.²¹ Wheeler immediately appealed to Judge Kane, who issued a writ of habeas corpus ordering Williamson to present the slaves. Two days later, Williamson appeared in John’s courtroom and denied that the slaves were ever in his “custody, power or possession.” Furthermore, he had no knowledge of the fugitives’ current whereabouts. Since Williamson had clearly assisted in the slaves’ escape, John declared him in contempt of court and sent the abolitionist to prison with-

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out bail. Williamson, who had clashed with John in an earlier case, feared that the judge would act “in the most vindictive manner.” John’s extensive personal, financial, and legal connections with Wheeler’s father-in-law Thomas Sully (a famous painter) undoubtedly increased Williamson’s skepticism of his impartiality. Technically, the legal issue did not involve the Fugitive Slave Law because Wheeler had voluntarily brought his slaves to Pennsylvania, and an 1847 Pennsylvania personal liberty law thus freed the slaves in the view of abolitionists. Nevertheless, the case spoke to the broader controversy over the legal status of fugitives in the North and aroused intense sectional feelings. Indeed, Kane used legal proceedings related to the case to declare Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law unconstitutional since it potentially conflicted with federal law and to assert that southerners could legally bring their slaves to the North, because slaves were property and therefore had no rights in court.²² Even as he faced a growing firestorm of criticism, John steadfastly declared that he would free Williamson only when he had shown proper deference to the legal authorities and provided information regarding the fugitives. Williamson, however, refused to do so. The standoff continued until early November, when both sides agreed to back down (though most public commentary suggested Kane blinked first). After Williamson agreed to slightly alter his testimony, Kane released him. Williamson subsequently sued him for false imprisonment, a case that ended only with John’s death in February 1858.²³ Even more than his actions during the Christiana case, Kane’s rulings on Williamson rendered him a polarizing figure. Southerners and many conservative northerners praised him for heroically upholding the law in the face of adverse public opinion. The Democratic Pennsylvanian, to which the Kanes had extensive ties, portrayed the contest as “between the Constitution and the designs of a band of wretched fanatics. . . . The rabies of the Abolitionist must be either killed or cured. There is no intermediate mode of treatment.”²⁴ By contrast, the majority of northern voices, both abolitionists and moderates, demonized Kane and cast Williamson in the role of an antislavery martyr. Many of Thomas’s antislavery allies, particularly Quakers, figured prominently in the campaign against John. “There is not a Quaker in Pennsylvania who does not feel himself personally insulted by Judge Kane,” Thomas wrote. Sumner published a letter sympathizing with Williamson and berating Kane. Garrison grouped Kane among a select group of northern politicians and judges whom he described as “intelligent, responsible, and colossal conspirators against the liberty, peace, happiness, and safety of the republic, whose guilt cannot easily be exaggerated.” Greeley’s New York Tribune, hoping to rally support for the infant Republican Party, led the charge against Kane, portraying him as a corrupt agent

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of the Slave Power and accusing him of doing “more at a single blow to shake the social fabric . . . than the vices of private criminals in half a century.”²⁵ The press also used the controversy to argue that both southerners and doughfaced northerners like John Kane willingly subverted the liberties of northern whites to serve the Slave Power, a charge that resonated with moderates. In the view of one Philadelphia newspaper, “Judge Kane’s decision . . . has made more ‘abolitionists’ and excited a more rancorous feeling against slavery than all the debates, feuds, and broken compromises of the past.” The New York Herald called him the “Columbus of the new world of slave-whips and shackles.” When Elisha triumphantly returned from his second Arctic voyage in October to substantial acclaim, newspapers again distanced one of Judge Kane’s sons from himself. One New Hampshire paper queried whether the noble Elisha was “related to that other Cain who killed his brother Abel.” Kane’s actions earned him a place in the book Atrocious Judges: Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression. Private commentary confirms this highly negative image. Philadelphian Sidney George Fisher wrote in his diary that Kane’s actions were “contrary to law, oppressive & the result of a desire on the part of the Judge to please the South & thus open the way to preferment.” Kane also received hate mail from throughout the North. One letter simply quoted the Bible: “And the Lord set a mark upon Cain lest any man should kill him by the way / And Cain said unto the Lord my punishment is greater than I can bear.”²⁶ Biblical curses notwithstanding, Kane viewed himself as an honorable public servant, dutifully yet reluctantly upholding the law. Much to his personal chagrin, he told a correspondent, Williamson “made it my duty to place him in confinement.” Indeed, he continued, “I should now be well satisfied to know that he was released from duress.” However, as a conscientious judge, he had to “guard against feeling, lest it make itself an element of his judgment.” To Virginia senator James M. Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law, Kane likewise wrote: “My office in the case of Williamson was unpleasant, but not difficult. My relations with him have always been kindly; he has rendered me personal courtesies; and we have friends in common; he is withal a generous spirited man, and as brave as fanaticism itself.” Even so, Kane expressed surety as to the legal issues involved: “The right of a slaveholding citizen of Virginia or North Carolina, to pass through Pennsylvania, with his slaves, unmolested, has always seemed to me too clear for argument.”²⁷ Throughout the controversy, Thomas’s clerkship and family loyalties again clashed with his abolitionism. The day his father imprisoned Williamson, Thomas’s wife Elizabeth, who had married him in 1853, recorded his dilemma: “Tom was very much distressed today. A friend of his, Passmore Williamson, was

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committed to Moyamensing Prison, for helping slaves off, and Tom felt bound and pinioned by his duty as a Clerk of Court, and began yearning for the West.” Pleased after Thomas temporarily abandoned his idea of going West, Elizabeth continued, “I yet see that I must prepare for it ultimately.” While Thomas viewed his clerkship as “so great a bondage,” he and Elizabeth depended upon its income. Elizabeth saw the clerkship as “a merciful grant of God to us” since her sickly husband was “too weak to earn our livelihood” and they spent money freely, “for we live well, & Tom’s charities are large still.” Just as he had with the Christiana prisoners, Thomas allied himself with the abolitionist foes of his father, even paying for “Williamson’s comforts while in prison.” In September, Elizabeth recorded that they were paying for “P. W.’s board.” Years after Thomas’s death, Williamson told Elizabeth “of his unceasing gratitude” for Thomas’s assistance “in the most trying time of his life.”²⁸ The rift between father and son deeply distressed Judge Kane, who had always enjoyed a warm relationship with his adult sons, especially Thomas. Even during these troubled years, Elizabeth observed “that the Judge depends more on Tom, as a counsellor and confidant than he does upon his other sons.” Thomas and Elizabeth were living with his parents at this time, and John clearly wanted Thomas to understand his position. In August 1855, he approached Elizabeth and talked “for a long time about poor Passmore Williamson,” and Elizabeth “saw that his heart was sore for Tom’s sympathy.” Elizabeth intervened between her husband and her father-in-law, and Thomas relented to “let the Judge talk to him on the subject,” which caused John’s heart to be “lighter by far than it had been.” Elizabeth later recalled that even though the schism pained both father and son, their household continued in “unbroken harmony,” testimony to their “intense love.”²⁹ Indeed, the Kane family cultivated an atmosphere in which disagreements, particularly over issues of principle, were not only tolerated, but almost expected. Elizabeth described the Kanes as “most loving and lovable people.” Even so, she continued, “there was no rest, and no harmony in the household,” and she compared the “many-angled individuals” of the family to crystals, “each one of which was resolved on the reduction of the others to that fundamental or primary form.” Thus, the “warm hearts and quick tempers were in a perpetual state of irritation.” John was also intensely ambitious for his children, and he worried that Thomas’s devotion to unpopular causes would stem his worldly advancement. While not generally overtly hostile to Thomas’s involvement in radical social reform, John’s skepticism of his son’s activities stemmed in large part from his belief that Thomas had sacrificed opportunities for political and social influence.³⁰

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What motivated Thomas to question his father’s authority by publicly working to undermine his judicial decisions? Resentment against a powerful father? The desire to gain fame to rival brother Elisha? The bravery of a fanatic, as John had said of Williamson? A sincere attachment to abolitionism? While all of these factors probably contributed, Thomas’s actions can be partially clarified through the prism of masculinity. Judge Kane saw his masculine responsibility as strict adherence to his duty to enforce the law, even in the face of harsh criticism and possible personal misgivings. For Thomas and Pat, dependent on their father in various ways, their defiance of both his authority and social conventions suggests their own sense of manliness. Thomas, thirty-three years old in 1855, relied on his father for employment, and even after he was married, he lived for the most part under his father’s roof. Pat, then twenty-eight and unmarried, likewise used his father’s connections to advance his own fledgling legal career and often lived at home. Thomas at times viewed this dependence, particularly his clerkship, through the metaphor of bondage and enslavement. Transgressions against their father’s authority became a way for the Kane sons to assert their own independence and manhood. Indeed, challenging authority was a culturally accepted component of most versions of nineteenth-century masculinity. While moral reformers fretted about insubordinate youth and acted to curb their potential rebelliousness, subversive acts against authority were an almost expected part of the transition to manhood.³¹ Thomas constructed his own sense of masculine identity from disparate strands of nineteenth-century manliness. In part, he drew on the gendered language of sentimentalism that the abolitionist press used to highlight the family dispute. Thus, the Pennsylvania Freeman trumpeted Thomas’s resignation as commissioner under the title “Manly” because it was “an act worthy of his heart.” Moreover, during the Christiana crisis, the Freeman noted that Thomas “ministered to the wants” of the prisoners, again filling the sentimental role, while his father “prostitutes his powers” on behalf of slavery. Many reformers, including Thomas, viewed the defense of the downtrodden as a manly endeavor, and they applied the language of sentimentalism to their task. In so doing, some of these reformers, particularly Garrisonian abolitionists, rejected contemporary norms of aggressive, violent masculinity. As a result, reform often carried an unmistakably feminine aura, a situation compounded by the high profile of female reformers and reformers’ support of women’s rights.³² Like the Garrisonians, Thomas supported women’s rights and deeply believed that humanitarian reform, of speaking for those who could not do so for themselves, was a manly act. He thrived on his own sense of standing against the crowd. He later wrote, “I have done a few manly deeds, and I have been abused

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for them.” His reform efforts had “brought about several noticeable results,” which had “all been achieved not with but in despite of the majority of my fellow citizens.” Thomas’s conception of the romantic hero related to this sense of manliness. The romantic hero descended in part from the eighteenth-century literary figure of the “Man of Feeling,” whose deep sensitivity for humanity and suffering distinguished him from his peers. Noted for his benevolence, the Man of Feeling, like Kane, generally had fragile health, a melancholic disposition, and an effeminate appearance. Unlike Kane, however, the Man of Feeling translated these qualities into timidity and introspection. While the romantic hero retained the Man of Feeling’s sensitivity and benevolence, he was also a man of action who boldly battled social injustices.³³ Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (the latter an acquaintance whom Kane deeply admired) published the two classic statements on the romantic hero in 1841, just as Kane was entering adulthood. For Carlyle, heroes—whom he called “Great Men”—shaped history; they were the “modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain.” Emerson asserted that a hero trusted his inner judgment, “advance[d] to his own music,” and remained stalwart in the path he had chosen. Iconoclasm, he argued, was a hero’s essential characteristic: “Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind.” Emerson found the model of an American hero in the abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, slain by an angry mob in November 1837 while defending his printing press. Furthermore, Emerson argued, a hero acted, not contemplated, and was “negligent of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists.” These characteristics—iconoclasm, action, disregard of personal safety and public image— defined Kane’s own sense of the hero and of manliness. He considered himself as among the “unthanked and unrewarded pioneers of unpopular Reform.” Defending the defenseless was an inherently manly act and justified defiance of cultural conventions and laws.³⁴ For the diminutive Thomas—described by Philadelphian Sidney George Fisher as “a little weak, boyish, sickly looking fellow” and by Mormon Hosea Stout as “uncommonly small and feminine”—the concept of the romantic hero called for an aggressive masculinity, and he used flamboyantly assertive gestures (particularly evident later during the Utah War and Civil War) to combat the image of the effeminate reformer. He also integrated the culture of honor, increasingly a southern phenomenon by this time, into his ideal of masculinity. This seemingly odd combination of the sentimental defense of the oppressed, the iconoclasm and brash assertiveness of the romantic hero, and a high sense

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of honor formed Thomas’s definition of masculinity and helps explain both his decision to defy publicly his father and the forms his opposition took.³⁵ Thomas’s actions at an 1850 convention of the Garrisonian American AntiSlavery Society in New York City reveal his commitment to this vision of manliness. Although Thomas generally dissented from Garrisonian abolitionism, he attended the convention. The New York penny press had called on citizens to disrupt the treasonous gathering of “abolitionists, socialists, Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists.” During the proceedings, a group of New York City b’hoys, led by Tammany Hall captain Isaiah Rynders, notorious for his violence and rioting, continually interrupted Garrison and other speakers. Following Garrison’s condemnation of the professedly Christian yet slave-owning president Zachary Taylor, Rynders rushed forward threateningly. In response, Kane leaped on the platform, ostensibly to protect William H. Furness, a Philadelphia Unitarian minister. He “rushed up to Rynders and shook his fist in his face” and threatened to kill him if he “touches Mr. Garrison.” Prominent writer George William Curtis remembered the scene (perhaps with some exaggeration): “Colonel Kane—a slight and fearless youth—made the notorious leader of the rioters quail. It was an instinctive manly honor, a natural love of honest liberty and fair play which, without pretense or flourish or ostentation of any kind, kept him always true to justice and humanity.”³⁶ The Garrisonians, committed to a more pacifist approach, recalled the scene differently. While Kane was a “young man of ardent temperament, open to generous ideas,” Furness thought that his hotheaded actions made him the “most dangerous element on our side.” Furness and another man held “young Kane down in his seat to keep him from breaking out into some act of violence.” Thomas wrote Pat: “I have by miraculose [sic] fortune escaped the Newspapers by nobody knowing my name. I was in the Mob at Garrison Row & did all sorts of follies including standing out on a platform and swearing oaths to break a porter bottle at a man whom I invited to personal combat; and who could have sent me to hell with his little finger.” Some semblance of order was eventually restored to the meeting. The following day, however, Rynders’ b’hoys succeeded in driving off the abolitionists, a move that played into the hands of the antislavery movement, which used the event to demonstrate how slavery threatened northern civil liberties like freedom of speech and assembly.³⁷ Besides Thomas’s sense of manliness, the family dispute over fugitive slaves also stemmed partly from a disagreement over the nature of law and justifiable civil disobedience. “The Judge dearly loved Tom,” Elizabeth later wrote, “though he never succeeded in persuading him to practice Law. The Judge thought the Law the noblest profession a man could follow, Tom thought it a school for pervert-

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ing a man’s conscience.” His legal scruples, Elizabeth opined, led Judge Kane “into an obedience to the pitiless Fugitive Slave Law shocking to Tom, while my dear father-in-law’s naturally tender heart longed for the freedom of Tom’s.” According to Elizabeth, John turned a blind eye to his son’s abolitionist activities, including his private assistance to fugitive slaves: “The family had their secret jests over the ‘black beggars’ over whom he sometimes stumbled—without seeing them!” Thomas, meanwhile, justified civil disobedience and adhered to a “higher law” doctrine common among abolitionists. He asserted “the right of a member of society to break any law of which his conscience disapproved, if he did so openly and without attempting to escape outlawry.”³⁸ Even given this advocacy of public civil disobedience, Thomas secretly assisted the active Underground Railroad community of Pennsylvania’s free blacks and abolitionists. Philadelphia served as a main avenue of escape for fugitives going farther north. While aging abolitionists and their children often later exaggerated their role on the Underground Railroad, contemporaneous evidence confirms Thomas’s involvement. William Wood responded to a cryptic letter from him in 1852, “Your riddle, we read, that you had been assisting some Nigritude to freer latitudes.” William Still, the chairman of the Vigilance Committee of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery (the central clearinghouse for Philadelphia’s Underground Railroad), wrote in 1872 that Thomas “had given abundant evidence that he approved of the Underground Rail Road.” Elizabeth described her husband as an “efficient member of its Board of Managers,” who “whirled” many fugitives “out of the City of Brotherly Love, carrying them sometimes forty miles of a night in his light wagon.” Family legend posited that Thomas even hid fugitives in his father’s own barn. In addition, Pat served as secretary of a vigilance committee to help fugitive slaves.³⁹ As Thomas publicly and privately supported fugitive slaves, John became an important symbol in the national debate over the Fugitive Slave Law and slavery. Abolitionists and even more moderate northerners accused John of prostituting northern liberties to satisfy southern slave owners. Conservative northerners and most southerners, meanwhile, denounced antislavery agitators like Thomas, who willingly subverted the law (and, in his case, parental authority) to help fugitives escape. Indeed, antislavery transgressions against the Fugitive Slave Law (and the responses of southerners and conservative northerners to this civil disobedience) helped define political and social boundaries in an increasingly polarized nation. The very act of deciding who behaved badly—northerners like Judge Kane willing to conciliate the South or abolitionists like Thomas pushing for sectional confrontation—created political fault lines within both the North and the nation that, a few years later, helped cause the Civil War.

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In 1853, amidst his work for abolitionism and Mormonism, Thomas, then thirty-one years old, married his sixteen-year-old second cousin, Elizabeth Dennistoun Wood. He saw their union as a reforming marriage, with his wife as a partner in his reform causes. Thomas urged his young wife to attend medical school at the pioneering Philadelphia-based Female Medical College, where he served as a corporator (the equivalent of a member of the Board of Trustees). Together, Thomas and Elizabeth envisioned a society based on gender equality and sought to advance women’s education and to reform the institution of marriage itself. Elizabeth also joined her husband in his attempts to battle urban poverty, as Thomas founded and financed a nursery school/kindergarten for Philadelphia’s poor children and served as a local leader for the House of Refuge movement, which aimed to reform juvenile delinquents. Reformers of all varieties searched for solutions to urban poverty, and many evangelical reformers also worked to increase women’s status in society (though generally not as radically as the Kanes). Nevertheless, Thomas’s efforts to address issues of gender and class reinforced his reform sensibilities, as he primarily interacted with reforming Democrats outside the mainstream evangelical culture. Born in 1836 in Bootle, England (a suburb of Liverpool), the third of six children, Elizabeth (nicknamed Bessie) grew up “in an upper-middle-class merchant family devoted to business and Christian living.” Thomas first met Elizabeth, then four years old, during his visit to England in 1840. He became fast friends with her father, William Wood, a Scottish merchant who had married John Kane’s cousin Harriet Kane and taken her to live in Glasgow, Scotland, and then Liverpool. The Woods immigrated to New York City in 1844, and the

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friendship between William and Thomas deepened after Harriet’s death the following year. Wood greatly admired Kane and considered him, in 1852, “my truest & long my only friend.”¹ Elizabeth called her own upbringing the “reverse” of the emotional exuberance she found in the Kane family: “We were taught, if not to subdue our emotions, at least to repress their expression.” She complained: “Our natures had been curbed, and our health injured by the system of child-‘breaking’ our dear father thought to be religious training. He did all he could for us, sent us to the most expensive schools, taught us to be methodical, and truthful, whipped us occasionally, and by precept and example tried to make us Christians.” Though resentful of Wood’s religious instruction, Elizabeth herself became a devout evangelical. After his wife’s death, Wood married Harriet’s cousin Margaret Lawrence, who (in Elizabeth’s view) was a “mistress of the ‘Art of Making Home Unhappy.’” Since her father worked constantly and Margaret ignored the “care of the first family,” Elizabeth grew up ignorant “of all feminine arts and household ways.” At the age of sixteen, Elizabeth—“very delicate, very awkward, very silent, her life almost chilled to torpidity”—married “into the vivacious, scintillating explosive” Kane family.² The emotional coldness of the Wood household after Harriet’s death likely contributed to Elizabeth’s fascination with her dashing older second cousin, who showered the Wood children with attention and gifts during his trips to New York. Elizabeth had a schoolgirl crush on Thomas long before their romantic involvement. After their engagement, she told him: “I owe everything that is good in me to you for I remember I used to think whenever I got rid of a fault, that if I had been your child it would have pleased you. How I used to wish you would adopt me!” According to family tradition, Elizabeth announced at the age of twelve to her sister and friends, “I intend to marry Cousin Tom Kane!” A few years later, Elizabeth visited the Kanes in Philadelphia. One night, she pretended to fall asleep while Thomas “sat down to the piano in the next room, and began singing.” She recalled, “I know that then I did not think that I was in love, but I must have been,” as “nothing in the world [was] so dreadful as leaving you, never expecting to see you again, as I did.” By 1851, Thomas began to “manifest a partiality” for fifteen-year-old Elizabeth and visited the Woods often. Elizabeth had also “resolved to win” him.³ Thomas and Elizabeth became unofficially engaged on January 25, 1852. Knowing that her age would raise eyebrows, Thomas at first proposed that he commit to Elizabeth but refuse to receive promises from her until she became older. “A mere child, utterly unselfish,” Elizabeth deserved the right “when she

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is of age to go into Society, then look around her and make the choice which her head and judgment dictate.” To Thomas’s relief, his plan persuaded neither Elizabeth nor her father.⁴ Even with the disparity in their ages, Thomas and Elizabeth fully accepted the ideal of romantic love, and affectionate letters passed back and forth between New York City and Philadelphia. Elizabeth, initially unsure how to sign her letters to Thomas, closed a letter to her new fiancé, “Your friend and cousin.” Writing from the “low crowded business den” of Independence Hall, Thomas wooed his fiancée: “I love you so much that I begrudge every line of all this that does not tell you only and simply how much and how dearly I love you, my own dear darling, and will love you, now, and hereafter, evermore, forever and ever. I am your Cousin no longer. I shall never again be your friend. I am your sweetheart.” Thomas mailed her the first flower of spring and Elizabeth wrote back: “How much shall I charge? Six kisses a letter? And two you owed me before.” The devout teenager admitted day-dreaming of her fiancé during Sunday sermons. Elizabeth looked forward to Thomas’s visits to New York, hoping they could meet in the Wood home, “because I cannot kiss you in the street . . . and I can, at home. I don’t care whether it does sound as if I were making myself cheap.”⁵ Thomas initially saw their engagement as antithetical to his reform efforts. He assured William Wood that his reform energies had been spent; during the past year, he had “proved [himself ] fitted for a practical and common sense life.” He had already saved three thousand dollars and thought of putting aside “three fourths of my yearly income.” While Elizabeth “might do better perhaps in the matter of fortune,” Thomas was striving to make himself “a better catch in this respect.” More concerned with his health than his finances and unconvinced by his disavowals of reform, Wood instructed Thomas to not let “Poli[tics] or Mormons, or Blacks” to cause him to neglect his health. Wood hoped the marriage itself would improve Thomas’s physical well-being, given his daughter’s “calm quiet steadiness & want of ‘isms.’” In response, Thomas pronounced his health good and repeated his devotion to “practical affairs” rather than “any ism white or black.” Elizabeth also had some apprehensions about his reform commitments, particularly regarding the Mormons; she expressed relief that he had declined an opportunity to become governor of Utah, as “Deseret, in the engraving, doesn’t look very inviting.”⁶ Given their age difference, Thomas played a mixed role in Elizabeth’s life: mentor, father figure, husband, lover. During their engagement, she signed a letter, “Your Child-Wife (Oh, don’t wait till I am a woman!).” Elizabeth clearly felt inadequate, admitting, “I feel so conscious of my inferiority to you, that I am

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afraid you will not be happy with me.” The Kane family, she surmised, would be disappointed that Thomas had not chosen a “pretty, or rich, or intelligent lady.” Resolving to become worthy of her husband, she told him, “if you will take a Child-Wife, you will have to educate her for a Woman-Wife.” Elizabeth thus asked Thomas to “make out a plan for my studies,” so she could “make myself, at least a little, more fit to be your companion.” In response, Thomas assigned her essay topics but refused to give reading advice, explaining, “I do not know a more ill read person than myself.” Elizabeth, by contrast, was a voracious reader: “I ‘gobble up’ every book I lay my hands on, and I read terribly fast.” Elizabeth also worried about her household duties, since she “was never brought up, but simply came up like a weed” after her mother’s death. Thomas dismissed these concerns, writing that her priorities should “be to complete your education” (including “Medical School”) and “health, health, exercise & water cure.”⁷ Though he claimed to disavow his own radical causes, Thomas envisioned a career in reform for his future wife. He hoped Elizabeth would either write in support of reform causes or attend medical school to pioneer women’s medical education. To Wood, he connected his own disengagement with reform to Elizabeth’s future in reform: “For the career which I have in view for Bessie, I must have an income . . . fixed and assured.” During the summer of 1852, Elizabeth accompanied her father and stepmother on a European voyage. To endow her with a proper sense of the global spread of liberty, Thomas told her to visit sites of failed republican uprisings in Paris. More suspicious than her fiancé, Elizabeth wondered whether, if the republicans had been the ones “dressed in a little brief authority would they not have done the same?” To prepare for her role as Thomas’s partner in reform, Elizabeth consciously visited the worst parts of some European cities. The juxtaposition of her own comfortable life with the “alleys and hovels, and really wretched people” shocked her. In particular, she lamented the “horribly ferocious or so stupid and drunken men” and the women “going in and out of the Spirit Vaults and shaking their fists at each other, and dropping their poor bruised little babies in the gutter.” To fulfill Thomas’s expectations, she hoped she would grow “accustomed to seeing such people without feeling disgusted, or else I never could do any good.” He wrote Elizabeth, “while I leave your career entirely to your self, I wish to see you educated for it,” particularly so she could “combat the world in its own strongholds.” He clearly hoped her choice of career would place her in the ranks of reformers.⁸ Thomas and Elizabeth married in a Presbyterian church on April 21, 1853. To Brigham Young, Thomas wrote: “as I have neither married Beauty, Expectations, Millinery, Dancing, or Piano Playing, I think you may afford to congratulate me.” Elizabeth, he continued, possessed a “fine mind, a generous heart, a

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FIGURE 6. A portrait of Elizabeth Kane. (Reproduced by permission from Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.)

sweet temper.” Furthermore, she descended from many who were “staunch and valiant friends of civil and religious liberty.” If they had children, Thomas hoped to bequeath them “the ability and the will to stand up in their day for Truth and Honor.” The newlyweds initially lived next door to his parents, where they remained until the following fall, when they moved in with his parents. Along with the Kane family, Thomas and Elizabeth split their time between a Philadelphia mansion in the winter and a country estate outside of the city in the summer.⁹

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Elizabeth quickly realized that she had married not only an individual, but also into a tight-knit clan with a strong sense of family identity. The extremes of the Kane family puzzled her, as the family members frankly expressed their affections but easily erupted into volatile disputes. When the family “gathered round their Mother of a Sunday evening at the piano, and sang with exquisite melody,” Elizabeth “felt as if Heaven had come down on Earth.” The following day, though, she wrote, “half the family [would] fly the dinner table in a passion—I supposed they were parted forever. But at the tea-table there they all were, cheerful and kind as if nothing whatever had happened to be forgotten or forgiven.” The sons’ “disrespectful language” to their mother “shocked” Elizabeth, as did Jane’s feisty retorts, but she was also “amazed to find how passionately they loved her.” Furthermore, Elizabeth noted, John “always treated me with the tenderest courtesy,” and Jane “adopted me to be a child of her own: scolded me as I never had been scolded, and petted me in her own practical way.” While generally happy, she sometimes saw Jane as overbearing and feuded with the family, if only to her own diary. After one heated argument between the Kanes, she privately confided: “I do think the family are the most ungrateful creatures! I used to be afraid that my dear people would stand unfavorably in comparison with these, but indeed they have come out well.” The following day, however, she regretted her comments.¹⁰ By June 1853, two months after their marriage, Elizabeth was pregnant. While Thomas was “so pleased with the idea,” she felt unprepared and feared she might die in childbirth. Sensing her discomfort, Thomas encouraged her that their children “would most probably be goodlooking and healthy, if I [Elizabeth] only took care of my own health and maintained my cheerfulness.” However, she miscarried in July: “Tom and I have this sorrow in common, and it draws us so near together.” She prayed she would be a “good true wife to my noble generous husband” and “supply the place of his lost child, in his heart.” In 1855, Elizabeth gave birth to their first child, Harriet Amelia, who would be followed by Elisha Kent Kane in 1856, Evan O’Neill Kane in 1861, and William Kane in 1863 (after his father’s death, William took the name Thomas L. Kane Jr.).¹¹ In her diary, Elizabeth portrayed her relationship with Thomas as both deeply affectionate and filled with tension, particularly over religious differences. Elizabeth and her evangelical father hoped their influence would mute Thomas’s freethinking. Even though Thomas’s “mind revolts at the cant and stupidity” of many religious people, William Wood believed he had a “deep vein of natural religion.” God, Wood predicted, would yet break through the granite and “let in the light of his Holy Spirit upon what is beneath.” Wood compared Thomas to the apostle Paul, “whose mental pride, was not less than yours, his learning

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of the highest order.” Just as God spoke to Paul on his way to Damascus, Wood told him, so God “speaks to you, not in one way, but in many. He has taught you to feel deeply the utter worthlessness and vanity of all merely earthly pursuits.” Indeed, Wood saw divine providence in why Thomas’s “big heart and soul . . . should have been placed in such a frail packing case,” as God would use “sickness & sorrow” to bring him “to the foot of the Cross.” Thomas would then “burn the ‘curious books’ & throw [out] ‘philosophy.’”¹² During their courtship, Thomas and Elizabeth conversed extensively about religion, and Elizabeth joined a Presbyterian church so she could attend services with the Kane family. Displaying Auguste Comte’s continued influence, Thomas hoped that she would not confine her faith within a denomination but within the “mighty congregation of Humanity.” He also introduced Elizabeth to his own religious sensibilities and presented her with his prized copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ. Elizabeth confided that her minister “wants me to read Theological books,” but she feared “they would confuse me while they raised these doubts to allay them.” Thomas confirmed her instincts about theological treatises (the “second hand stuff out of the Moral Philosophy of Scotch men”) but shifted the rationale for avoiding them. While “any flame” of “true Religion” would draw them closer together, he lacked patience for “this wretched stuff,” with its “coldness,” “lifelessness,” and “superstition.” Thomas, however, gave his fiancée hope that he might yet become a conventional Christian. He informed her that the day of their engagement, January 25, was, by the Catholic calendar, the conversion of St. Saul, significant given her father’s prediction of a Paul-like conversion.¹³ Both learned to compromise on their religious differences. Elizabeth plaintively asked during their engagement, “when I live in Philadelphia, am I to go alone to church, always?” Once married, Thomas would walk Elizabeth to church but not stay for the services. On one Sunday, she skipped church and went with her husband to the woods: “Tom took stones and made a nice seat for me, and I read the Bible, and repeated hymns to him.” On another occasion, she noted, they studied the Bible together, “he reading the Latin and I the English and noting the differences. It is very pleasant.”¹⁴ Still, Elizabeth complained that Thomas and his irreligious brothers weakened her faith, as the constant verbal abuse of clergymen and “sectarian Christians” took its toll. In 1853, for instance, he attended a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C., and gave her a description that was less than faith-promoting. The minister prayed in “meaningless slang,” read “obsolete scriptures,” and was “careful to offend none of those who paid for his support.” In turn, the congregation listened indifferently and “sang old bits of Jew doggerel.” Dismayed,

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Thomas left and went to “another kind of Church,” probably a Masonic lodge, “a little dark old hole on a side street,” where he found the “rising of a little resinous smoke more edifying than ever so rational preaching.” Elizabeth’s disapproval, however, found him at the lodge; remembering how “distasteful the thing was to you dear Bessie,” he left.¹⁵ Elizabeth was genuinely puzzled about her husband’s religion. “I don’t know what the religion of the dear husband thou gavest me, is,” she prayed. “But I know how much more he acts like a Christian than I do . . . if he is not a Christian, make him one.” Nevertheless, after a few years of marriage, Elizabeth sounded some themes similar to her husband’s. In 1856, she wrote her sister: “I am thankful that Christ’s Gospel is of no sect . . . One may still be a Christian when the words Catholic and Protestant . . . no longer exist.” She also questioned the “Theological Architecture” each generation placed on Christianity; this “solid wall of creed” boxed in Christ’s teachings and prevented the “Temple of the Faith” from expanding to meet the “needs of the new generation.” Like her husband, she had come to see most conventional Christians as “narrow, bigoted, intolerant.”¹⁶ Even as their religious philosophies converged in some respects, they clashed over the “religious education” of their children. In 1854, Elizabeth prayed that God “would grant us no children” unless they “might make Christians of them.” Before the birth of their daughter Harriet, she prepared a letter for Thomas to read in case she died. She entrusted the coming baby to his care: “I would rather have you teach it to love our Saviour, than any one else. I have never known what your faith is, darling, but I am sure it can’t be very far wrong, or you would not be so good. But I know it is not quite the right faith, or it would make you happy.” Professing confidence that God would transform Thomas’s heart, Elizabeth urged him to raise the child a Christian, “but do not let its innocent mind receive any doctrine of sects.” After Harriet’s birth, they quarreled over whether to baptize her until Elizabeth “gave it up believing it would do us great harm . . . yet Tom is still a little estranged from me.” She later recalled to Thomas an agreement they had “painfully” reached for her to “take the boys and you the girls, or else I should influence them till they were sixteen, and you afterwards.”¹⁷ Besides religion, Thomas’s attempts to introduce his bride into Philadelphia high society created friction within their marriage. After they attended a formal ball in 1854, Elizabeth complained that she had not “gained anything,” but Thomas countered she “had taken the first step to lose my shyness and awkwardness.” She feared her lack of gentility would be readily evident to those in the Kanes’ social circles and that her husband would come to resent her “ugly face,” “rude ways,” and “incapacity to understand his feelings.” Although Eliza-

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beth sought to acquire genteel tastes for Thomas’s sake, Philadelphia society repulsed her. Feeling left out of the inside information, she sniffed, “A well bred Philadelphian prides himself upon having at his finger’s ends every scandalous anecdote that has ever been related of the remotest ancestor of his interlocuter’s most distant connection by marriage.” She also fashioned gendered critiques of Philadelphia’s aristocracy. At one ball, she saw a young woman with a “scar on the back of her neck, between her shoulders, and an exceedingly red face.” Upon closer inspection, Elizabeth found it was only the woman’s dress “being so tightly laced that her shoulder blades nearly met . . . How I would have liked to cut the Gordian Knot and set the poor red flesh free!”¹⁸ While she struggled to be genteel, the “queer appearance” of Thomas’s visitors—“Horace Greeley, Joseph the Herrnhutter, and the Apostles and Prophets of the Latter Day Saints”—unsettled her. In June 1854, for example, Thomas sent her a note directing her to prepare dinner for some “common men.” Thinking he meant “intimate friends,” Elizabeth ordered oysters. When three Mormon missionaries on their way to England arrived, she realized the “oysters were wasted on them.” One of the missionaries, James Ferguson (a former sheriff of Salt Lake County), interacted with the Kanes “in a natural and unembarrassed manner”; however, Elizabeth scoffed at the “many grammatical slips” and “mountain manners” of the other two lower-class missionaries. Had they been the first Mormons she had ever met, she “would not be inclined to disbelieve the stories of Mormon evils,” nor would she “be surprised to see these men in the Insane Asylum, or in the Penitentiary.” By contrast, Thomas’s more refined Mormon friends intrigued Elizabeth; after a March 1856 visit from Apostle John Taylor and William Kimball, she noted, “How nice it is to see people so different from oneself.”¹⁹ Jane Kane found her son’s visitors (Mormons and other passing “oddities”) more irritating than interesting. Although she often shared Jane’s suspicions, Elizabeth “felt bound in honour to defend” her “husband’s guests.” One winter when Thomas “was confined to his room by an attack of pleurisy, the Mormons were perpetually hovering about the house.” Elizabeth had to “smuggle” the visitors upstairs to meet with him, while Jane “would sit irate, darning her stockings in the library, vowing half in fun that she would give them a ‘piece of her mind.’” Elizabeth successfully ferried most Mormons past, but Jane caught “apple-cheeked Apostle [George Q.] Cannon,” who pleaded, “you know we are bound by the Colonel not to defend our doctrines here.” Jane, “conscious that she had tackled him,” brushed off Cannon’s statement: “Who cares what Tom said! Mr. Cannon, I ask you once again how many deluded creatures do you call your wives?” Elizabeth rescued Cannon “off the battle-field.”²⁰

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While Thomas’s unusual guests and his agitation for radical reforms increasingly placed him at the margins of Philadelphia society, Elisha’s second Arctic voyage transformed him—or at least the image of the dashing “Doctor Kane”— into a bona fide national hero. When Elisha again sailed for the Arctic in May 1853, he left behind the unfinished manuscript of his book recounting his first expedition. Elisha wrote, “I fear that there will not be a readable book unless that dear working Father does the didactic and Tom the Attractive.” John and Thomas fulfilled their appointed roles in editing the book, and Elisha’s The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin was released by Harper Brothers the following March. Thomas assiduously promoted both Elisha’s book and his second voyage. One of Elisha’s biographers has noted, “in many ways ‘Dr. Kane’ was as much a reflection of Tom as of Elisha . . . Tom was the one who took this raw material and from it created the heroic figure that the public knew and adored.”²¹ As two years dragged by without news from Elisha, however, many feared that he and his crew were lost in the Arctic. The Kane family pushed for a relief expedition (to save the would-be rescuers of Sir John Franklin), which left in May 1855. John Kane Jr. joined the expedition and Thomas also wanted to sign up. Elizabeth, then pregnant, conceded he could go if he could persuade his father and his doctors “to approve his going, and to say they think it likely to improve his health.” Elizabeth was pleased when he failed to meet the conditions, as she knew her husband “was born imprudent” and would take unnecessary risks. When Elisha triumphantly returned in October 1855, Thomas set to work on Elisha’s second book of Arctic exploits. While Thomas had always found both emotional satisfaction and frustration in his relationship with Elisha, Elizabeth only resented the time and effort her husband spent in promoting his brother. In her eyes, Thomas’s devotion to Elisha worsened their own financial problems and Thomas’s health. “Tom is so busy on E’s book that he can’t do anything else,” Elizabeth fumed. “E will probably be renowned in the story of this generation, while Tom will not be known. Yet Tom perfectly unselfish, never requiring a service from any one, but always working for others, never spending either time or money on his own gratification—only wanting money to spend in doing good, bearing sickness so patiently, and working for others through it—a model of complete self denial, self abnegation—is as superior to E as light to darkness. All is not gold that glitters!” Elisha’s book became a runaway best seller upon its release in September 1856 as Arctic Explorations in the Years 1853, ’54, ’55.²² While Elisha’s career soared, Thomas’s stagnated. Financial setbacks intruded on his and Elizabeth’s early years of marriage, as his income gradually declined. In June 1854, for example, the Kanes overdrew their bank account, and they

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worked to free themselves from debt (which they did by March 1855). Even so, Thomas struggled with his diminished income. “Poor fellow!” Elizabeth sighed. “I wish I could earn money for him but alas I only spend it, spend, spend, spend.” She estimated that her husband’s income had fallen to “less than half what it was when he was engaged,” partly because of judicial reforms that restricted the amount of fees clerks could charge. Judge-shopping also limited Thomas’s income, as John Kane had acquired a reputation for having his decisions reversed by the Supreme Court.²³ In 1856, Thomas became involved with the McKean and Elk Land Improvement Company, the owner of vast stretches of property in the Allegheny Mountains of northwestern Pennsylvania (in McKean and Elk counties), in which John Kane had a substantial stake. That summer, Thomas and Elizabeth moved to the “Back Woods of Pennsylvania,” where he searched for favorable routes for a proposed railroad, hoping to influence its path and thereby increase the value of his family’s lands. The cool mountain air proved salubrious and the Kanes decided to winter in Philadelphia (to fulfill his clerkship duties) and summer in the Alleghenies. Thomas’s career change, which took him away from lawyerly offices and courtrooms to rustic mountains and forests, resonated with the romantics’ call to return to nature. Emerson, for instance, urged reformers to reject professions that were “dishonest and unclean” (as Thomas generally viewed lawyers) and to put themselves “into primary relations with the soil and nature” and thus take part “in the manual labor of the world.” Eventually, Thomas became the land agent of the McKean and Elk Company and moved permanently to McKean County after the Civil War.²⁴ Joint efforts in reform also marked Thomas’s and Elizabeth’s early marriage, though Elizabeth struggled to fulfill her husband’s reform expectations. When she visited a women’s prison, her husband was “much pleased,” though she “paid with a severe headache.” Thomas’s free-spending on reform-related projects troubled Elizabeth, as did his vision of her as a leading reformer. She fretted, “Tom speaks of my being the instrument of some great work—of lecturing to women, etc.” Elizabeth, though, felt “little vocation . . . for the ideal life” he sought for her. Rejecting a public role in reform, she defined her ideal: “To have health, daily work cut out by God, mental occupation, and to have him my dear companion, in health, labouring at his daily mind, living in the midst of our family.”²⁵ Even with Elizabeth’s doubts, she participated with Thomas in ventures in both educational reform and women’s rights. They first addressed urban poverty and juvenile rebellion, as Thomas established and financially supported a school for impoverished children in Philadelphia, modeled after the French salles

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d’asile (infant schools), that Elizabeth helped administer. Although the school was aimed at very young children, Thomas connected it with a crisis he saw in rising rates of teenage crime and immorality. Urban reformers of all varieties intensely worried about juvenile delinquency. For instance, William D. Kelley, one of Kane’s associates in Democratic reform, wrote that Philadelphia suffered from “riot and tumult” caused by the “wayward and restless youths who congregate at the street corners, hang about hose and engine houses, and throng the places of cheap and vulgar amusement.” Early intervention, Kane believed, could break the cycle that entrapped poor urban youth. His foray into educational reform illustrates his willingness to address the structural problems of society that plagued the poor.²⁶ Kane’s educational reform also reveals the transatlantic influences on his thought. Scottish reformer Robert Owen founded the first infant school in 1816, and the idea quickly spread to England, Ireland, and the European continent. In the late 1820s, Americans imported the system, and infant school societies were founded in New York City, Boston, and other cities; the Philadelphia of Kane’s youth boasted the largest movement in the country. In some ways a precursor of kindergartens (which became entrenched throughout the United States between the Civil War and World War I), infant schools targeted children between eighteen months and the earliest age they could enter public schools, usually between four and six. Most of the schools, which began as private charities, enrolled roughly two hundred children under the supervision of female teachers. The schools emphasized a holistic approach to early childhood education, giving attention not just to academics but also to moral and physical development by teaching skills, removing children from corrupt influences, and inculcating Christian morality. The movement reached its peak in the United States in the 1830s before beginning a rapid decline as the schools came to be seen as a threat to the mother-child bond because of the young age of the children involved. Furthermore, American educators in the 1830s argued that overstimulation of children’s minds could lead to insanity. The schools contributed to their own decline by abandoning their initial holistic emphasis in favor of a focus on academics. Even though poor parents seemed to retain their enthusiasm, by the 1840s and 1850s most schools had shut their doors.²⁷ Kane’s infant school differed in some respects from these attempts, though he undoubtedly was exposed to the earlier Philadelphia movement. Whereas the initial schools had imitated British models, Kane looked instead to the French salles d’asile, which, though inspired by the British, had taken a somewhat different course. The salles d’asile, in particular, retained a focus on holistic education, such as advocating education through play. Kane likewise criticized contempo-

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rary public education for aiming only at “Mental Instruction” while ignoring “Moral or Physical Education.” In addition, Kane’s attention had been drawn to the “condition of the suffering poor of Moyamensing,” Philadelphia’s most impoverished neighborhood. In his eyes, Moyamensing was an urban blight, the “seat of the deepest depravity,” typical of slums in many burgeoning American cities. The skeptic Kane even lamented the “want of true hearted and earnest Religious Instruction.” Unchecked by religious impulses, problems that began in the “Tavern and the Brothel” often ended “in the Alms House & the Prison.” Recalling his time in France, Kane viewed the salles d’asile as a possible solution to the urban crisis.²⁸ Accordingly, Kane established an infant school in 1851 or 1852, which he personally funded (at a cost of twelve hundred dollars annually) until 1855. He banned sectarian religious instruction but allowed Bible reading, hymns, and prayer in order to form a moral basis of instruction. Rejecting formal theology, Kane wanted religion to be “taught by the Shell, the Mineral, the Coal that burns in the stove and the flower that blooms in the window.” He aimed to inculcate “habits formed of self respect, self denial and questioning exercise of conscience,” three central tenets of his personal religious philosophy.²⁹ Both Elizabeth and Thomas’s younger sister Bessie participated in the school’s operation. Elizabeth expressed pleasure in the children’s progress: “They were very good children and amazingly bright.” She was also elected a manager of the local Infant School Society, though she quickly tired of the “stupid” group. Thomas and Elizabeth read in the European literature on infant schools and ordered books and other items for the school from France.³⁰ Kane sought to create a broader movement for infant schools, and using his customary tactics, he took his campaign to the public. In 1855, he published an anonymous pamphlet, Two Letters to a Member of the Board of Controllers of the Public Schools From a Tax Payer, lectured on the subject, and wrote and inserted in local newspapers a “number of articles . . . to influence the public mind in favor of Infant Schools.” Kane argued that government support of infant schools would curb an alarming rise in “juvenile ignorance” and a corresponding increase in “juvenile depravity.” Only half of eligible students enrolled in the Philadelphia common schools, and the percentage was declining. Comparing Philadelphia with other cities in the United States and Europe, Kane argued, “where will you find such a scandalous neglect of Infant Instruction as in Philadelphia?” Economic necessity forced children as young as six to work, while those as young as three supplemented the family income through “begging and pilfering.” In the streets, they learned the “depraved secrets of drunkenness, rob-

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bery and prostitution” and were initiated into the “freemasonry of crime.” The exclusion of younger children from public schools contributed to the problem because their older siblings remained at home to care for them while their parents worked. Though Kane had initially advocated only private infant schools, “four years of practical experience” had convinced him that government-funded schools were the only solution to the juvenile delinquency crisis. Besides the financial difficulties of private schools, only religious groups (especially Catholics) would operate most schools. While Kane saw no problem with Catholic schools, most Americans believed they led to “sectarian bitterness” and saw the “Common School System” as essential in a democratic society.³¹ Kane’s campaign for public financing appears to have aroused little interest. His efforts to encourage government involvement coincided with his declining ability to fund his school, and it closed in September 1855. Nevertheless, Kane continued to engage with the problems of urban poverty and juvenile delinquency by serving on the Board of Managers for several years of the city’s House of Refuge, which aimed to reform juvenile criminals and vagrants by removing them from the influence of adult criminals in prisons and by educating them in a trade. His advocacy of infant schools and the House of Refuge marked a shift in his reform ethos in that he more explicitly addressed questions of class and agitated for direct government sponsorship of reform institutions. This personal transition from advocating purely private associations to encouraging greater government regulation and funding foreshadowed a broader shift in reform sensibilities that characterized the decades following the Civil War and became the mainstream reforming spirit of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.³² Although Elizabeth supported her husband’s efforts to address poverty, the campaign for women’s rights was much more of a joint enterprise. Thomas became an advocate for women’s rights and education at an early age and later sought to instill his views in his young wife. In a notebook given him in 1839, he railed at the dismal state of women’s education and depicted marriage as enslavement for women. Contemporary society valued women primarily for their bodies, not their minds, the youthful Kane charged, and their education focused on “exterior manifestations” rather than “enlargement of the mind.” Kane linked this failure to properly educate women with the potentially destructive effects of marriage. Thus, a “nervous weak bodied, nursery child . . . is made at the age of 16 (engagement) to enter into a contract which binds her, soul, body, & goods— for life . . . to enslave herself for 70 years it may be.” Before his time as an abolitionist and before the term “white slavery” had come to mean prostitution, he compared wives to slaves: “We talk of oppressed Africans—What white slaves

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are these in our midst? Our sisters and our mothers!” Indeed, a young woman of marriageable age, “who is being taught tricks & fed bread & butter till she is brought into the market to be sold,” was little better than a prostitute.³³ In addition, Kane targeted gender discrimination in the churches and the double standard of sexual morality. In the “Early Christian Church,” he wrote, women “spoke in meeting.” Most contemporary churches, by contrast, banned women from preaching, and Kane noted the “Sad Fate of Mrs Ann Hutchinson,” the seventeenth-century Puritan exiled from Massachusetts for challenging the authority of male ministers. “More religious, [and] pure” than men, women should be able to not only speak in church, but were also “better fitted than man for one class of priesthood.” Kane’s criticism of the relationship between gender and religion—he later referred to the “monosexual halfness of our modern Protestantism”—probably contributed to his disillusionment with organized Christianity. He also condemned the double standard that fixed eternal shame on a woman who had yielded to sexual passion before marriage, while a man could redeem his reputation “by deeds of gallantry bravery or honesty in the world’s open field, or committing duel murder.” Kane expressed his critique of society’s gender norms in his anonymous newspaper writings during the 1840s, as he advocated the “Rights of Man but Woman first.” He recognized the perils associated with openly supporting women’s rights: “The champion who in so holy a cause ventures forth is shot down by ridicule and that too often in the back by W[omen] self—his own rank & file.”³⁴ During her engagement to Thomas, Elizabeth professed little interest in women’s rights. She wrote: “I am glad to be my husband’s inferior that he may raise me up to him, glad, that it is my duty to honour and obey him. And as to Woman’s Rights, if my husband treats me as his equal, and his friend, I cannot see what more I could desire.” Thomas discounted her demurrals. Employing his “physiognomic skill” on Elizabeth’s daguerreotype, he claimed to recognize that she could “rule me in everything just as absolutely as she pleases.” “So none of your nonsense any more about ‘obedience,’ ‘graceful consort’ &c. and those disclaimers of ‘Woman’s Rights,’” he chided. Nevertheless, Elizabeth insisted, “There never was such a submissive wife as I shall be!” Thomas, however, clearly hoped his fiancée would adopt his views of gender roles. He admonished her, “Don’t go on talking in the love honor & obey strain.” He envisioned a future in which men would view traditionally feminine qualities—“patience, humility, self denial, surrender of will”—as worthy of emulation. Nevertheless, his teenage fiancée largely rejected Kane’s theorizing of a radical reconstruction of masculinity and femininity. Rather, she joked, “Are you going to give me my Rights, whatever they are?”³⁵

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Nevertheless, both Thomas and Elizabeth mocked the ideal of genteel courtship, a precursor to their more radical critiques of society’s gender roles. In particular, they took aim at the advice books of Sarah Stickney Ellis, an English author whose popular conduct books for middle- and upper-class women mixed domesticity and gentility. Before her European trip in 1852, Elizabeth sarcastically pledged to purchase all “Mrs Ellis’ ‘Women’ books when I am in England, and after studying them diligently will return to America, give a single finger to you, ‘How do you do, Mr Kane?’ I am convinced that happiness is to be found only in a single life, I shall spend a more blameless life by my fireside, with my cat, than I could otherwise.” Joking about “Mrs Ellis” allowed the couple to imagine a rebellion against social mores, though in reality their courtship (except for their ages) was fairly conventional.³⁶ During her early married life, Elizabeth gradually awoke to the women’s rights movement. Thomas ensured that they attended appropriate events, such as a “delightful lecture on Woman’s Rights” in 1854 by Antoinette Brown, who had become the first female ordained Protestant minister in the country the previous year. The Kanes also associated with leading feminists, such as the Philadelphia Quakers Lucretia and James Mott. Most significantly, Thomas suggested that his wife attend the recently founded Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. Elizabeth enrolled during the winter of 1853–54 “in order to help the college by the influence of her social position and name on the list of students.”³⁷ Even before their marriage (perhaps already influenced by Thomas), Elizabeth had her sights on a medical career. Her father wrote Thomas in 1851, “Our Bess has quite an idea of studying Medicine & Surgery,” perhaps with Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the United States or Europe to obtain a medical degree. After their marriage, however, Elizabeth expressed the decision to become a doctor in passive terms. In August 1853, she recorded, “Tom it seems thinks of making me a doctor if I grow strong.” The next month, Thomas brought her a report of the Female Medical College. Intrigued, she recorded in her diary, “How I should like to be a physician if only to do good to the sick poor!”³⁸ Established in 1850, the Female Medical College (later renamed the Woman’s Medical College) was the first school designed to train women as doctors. Pat Kane served as one of the original five corporators, and other Kane family friends—the Quaker physician William Elder, the Democratic reformer William Kelley, and James Mott—figured prominently in the school’s early governance. Thomas soon became a member of an enlarged Board of Corporators. The school’s founders were primarily Quaker reformers, many of whom became acquainted with Kane through reform, especially antislavery. Like Kane, these male advocates of women’s rights defined manliness through iconoclasm, the

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advocacy of unpopular reforms, and a sense of courageously facing violent opposition (actual and rhetorical).³⁹ The Female Medical College initially provoked heated opposition, particularly by the professional medical community and many evangelical ministers, and Kane’s involvement with it further defined his place on the margins of the reform community. Opponents advanced a variety of arguments: women’s weaker bodies made them incapable of the rigors of medical practice; pursuing a medical career would corrupt and “de-sex” women; and female doctors would neglect their families and proper social roles. Reflecting this atmosphere, Jane Kane and other relatives excoriated Thomas for “making” Elizabeth “associate with those horrible Female Medicals,” as she would “lose all delicacy of tone.” Ann Preston, a crusading Quaker who was one of the original students and subsequently became a professor and dean of the college, later recalled that Elizabeth had “endured a petty persecution of pin pricks for daring to receive” Preston “on terms of equality” in the Kanes’ home.⁴⁰ Conscious of her place as an example, Elizabeth sought to rebut these objections. While she did not yet have children, she thought “my health is as delicate as most women’s and if I can only prove that I am happier, and stronger, and that my household find no diminution in my cares . . . I think my example will be worth something as an argument.” Proponents of female doctors also argued that women’s nurturing natures uniquely qualified them to care for women and children, especially since many women were reluctant to seek the services of male doctors for gynecological problems. Seeing female patients who had been dismissed or mistreated by male doctors heightened Elizabeth’s feminist sensibilities.⁴¹ Elizabeth attended classes at the Female Medical College somewhat sporadically in 1853 and 1854. In January 1855, Thomas made an arrangement for her, then pregnant, to receive private lessons from Preston. Eventually, Elizabeth stopped even these lessons, though she returned to the college in the winter of 1859–60 to attend lectures and dissections. Her medical expertise proved invaluable when the Kanes moved to McKean County, as Elizabeth and Thomas jointly acted as community doctors. In 1869, she celebrated the rapid social acceptance of female physicians. As evidence of changing attitudes, she wrote, “Women who denounced my study most vehemently come to me with wistful faces and pour into my ears stories of unnecessary sufferings, induced by ignorance, endured in silence because they could not bear to reveal them to a male doctor.” Even male physicians, “who abused us most roundly,” now respected Elizabeth’s advice. She proudly copied into her journal a letter from Preston, who similarly exulted about the “rapid change in professional sentiment.” Both

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Elizabeth and Preston may have overstated their case, as staunch opposition continued in many quarters. In 1881, Elizabeth returned to the college with her daughter Harriet and they graduated together in 1883. One newspaper commented, “She now receives the diploma which gives her formally the title she has earned both in the classroom and the service.”⁴² The Kanes’ engagement with women’s rights and medical education also influenced their personal relationship. In 1869, prompted partly by her contemplation of Mormon polygamy, Elizabeth elaborated a “theory” of women’s rights in her journal.⁴³ Most people, she began, accepted a sexual double standard, admitting either implicitly or explicitly that “men are not made to be as chaste as women.” As “a Christian” and the “single wife of a faithful husband,” Elizabeth rejected this conclusion, and she set out to “prove to [her] own satisfaction that God did not make man less chaste than woman.” She theorized that while man originally was naturally monogamous, “ages of sinful indulgence on his part increased his polygamous propensities.” In response, woman gradually “underwent a physical change” and became “less chaste than other female animals . . . and so fostered the unnatural passions of man.” As a result, both genders grew up receiving an “unconscious education . . . from their elders to look upon their intercourse simply from a sexual point of view.” Thus, a focus solely on “marrying or lovemaking” warped relationships between men and women. Elizabeth placed women’s lack of control over their own sexuality and childbearing at the center of her critique of gender norms. She particularly criticized Christians who “consider monogamy right, without ceasing to act as they did when polygamy had become the rule.” Once a chaste man married, she wrote, he “thinks he is right in putting no restraint upon his passions, and his wife is so glad to be sole possessor of his love that she encourages him.” Since they generally refused to prevent conception, religious men (especially the clergy) “kill their wives or ruin their health by excessive childbearing.” On the other hand, if women sought to prevent pregnancy, they could incur some of the “Diseases of Women.” Some women “never ought to have married,” and married life became “physical wretchedness” for them. “Is there no remedy?” Elizabeth queried. “Must we die or drag on lives of pain—or submit to have our husband’s love cease for us, or he become unfaithful?” Elizabeth proposed a variety of solutions that guided the Kanes’ own intimate and family life. The “Marriage Vow,” she asserted, should not be “felt by the best women to bind upon them the absolute giving up of their bodies to their husbands’ control.” Married couples should prevent conception only through abstention (“live together like brother and sister”). She advised women to “retain their husband’s love without kindling their lust” by not “dressing to provoke

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them.” Female doctors formed an integral part of her plan, as they could warn mothers that a sickly daughter was not “formed to be a healthy mother” and should be trained for a profession rather than marriage. (The Kanes’ own daughter, Harriet, who suffered from a variety of physical ailments, never married.) Female doctors could also contribute to sexual education; while they might offend “conventional ideas of delicacy,” they would not decrease “actual purity.” A young woman often experienced marital sexuality as a “fearful shock” and struggled “to reassert to herself that she is as pure and honorable in her matronhood as in her virgin innocence.” Under Elizabeth’s vision, women would also enter the professions and receive the vote. More radically, she called for the castration of syphilitic men and the “right of divorce free to every woman whose husband broke his marriage vow, but I would allow neither to marry again.” Elizabeth outlined several advantages to her plan. Foremost, it would preserve women’s health, primarily because of fewer pregnancies. Though birthrates would fall, “many more healthy children” would be raised. Instead of greeting pregnancy as a burden, women would see it as a blessing. Although infrequent, sex would improve: “as they will look forward to the birth of each child as a day to be preceded by a honeymoon of love and happiness even sexual love will last longer.” Education and suffrage would also improve the marital relationship. When an educated woman devoted herself to childrearing, both the marriage and the children would benefit: “Is her husband going to suffer by her having such a knowledge of medicine that she can keep her household in health? . . . Is her interest in the politics of the country to be detrimental to the young legislators growing up around her knees?” When Elizabeth recorded her theory in 1869, she left many questions unanswered. When had she first formulated these ideas? What were the connections between the development of her theory and her own private relationship with Thomas? Did tensions in their own intimate life prompt her ideas? Had she as a newlywed experienced sex as a “fearful shock”? Had she felt that Thomas had put “no restraint upon his passions” in their early married life? And how did he view her ideas? Did the couple’s implementation of her theory introduce tensions of its own? While some of the answers to these questions are unknowable, partial clues to others can be found in Elizabeth’s diary and the couple’s correspondence. Certainly, Elizabeth’s theory bears resemblances to Thomas’s early writings on gender, including support for women’s education, condemnation of the sexual double standard, and the view of many marriages as “enslavement.” In addition, her initial reluctance to have children, and her feelings of both regret and relief after her miscarriage in 1853, probably contributed to her ideas.

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Furthermore, her shifting views on fashion provide insight into her plan’s evolution. After Harriet’s birth in 1855, she had tried “to dress in colors and a style that pleased” Thomas, wanting to be “charming in his eyes.” Following Elisha’s birth sixteen months later, Thomas and Elizabeth decided “for many reasons to have no children for some years.” To quell her husband’s sexual desire, she “wanted to avoid anything like coquetry to abjure l’amour for l’amitié [give up love for friendship].” She thus wore clothes of “nunlike plainness.” The decision, however, was not without its problems: “Though Tom thinks he loves me as intensely as ever, I never see, as I sometimes did when Bess had company and I had dressed to please him, his eyes fixed on me with the old loverlike intensity. I wanted to be his sister, yet I don’t like it now.”⁴⁴ Thomas’s sense of gentlemanly propriety revolted against his wife’s plain dress, and tension simmered below the surface of their relationship. In 1860, the Kanes decided they could “righteously be united again,” and Thomas wanted Elizabeth “to go to some expense to adorn myself as a bride.” He deflated her attempt to wear “heliotrope powder” (a perfume) when he told her the scent reminded him “of some lady he was fond of in his earlier day.” Jealous, she sniffed, “No scent for me but the dissecting room.” Perhaps because of such incidents, Elizabeth worried that her husband would no longer find her beautiful: “I have forced my darling gentleman down from his brilliant days, his sweet music, and his cultivated society, his faith and purity—down to our poverty, his slipshod wife, hard work, trials, and misery.” Nevertheless, her three new “print dresses” seem to have sufficiently pleased Thomas, as they soon conceived their third son, Evan.⁴⁵ The couple’s dialogue continued during the Civil War. In 1863, after two and a half years of being “so prudish and good,” Thomas complained of Elizabeth’s “obstinate and constant effort to cover with gray mantles all the feminine graces which you yourself regard as lovely in others.” He further reminded her that he had grown “into manhood on terms of intimacy with ladies” of high rank and thus had a “gentleman’s notion of what a lady ought to be” (though Thomas quickly added his admiration for Elizabeth’s “Christian humility” and her “fine scorn and disgust for all pretension”). Elizabeth replied—a signal they were considering another child—“I am already turning over in my head what I shall wear this spring to fascinate you!” Following a visit to her husband at an army camp, she reflected on their initial mutual discomfort. “Prepared for a cool and respectable kiss” upon greeting, Elizabeth did not even receive a handshake. Rather, when they entered his tent, he caught her “unawares,” she wrote, “in that precious clasp that left me so confused when Aunt Mary came in there was no use in my trying to pretend I hadn’t been kissing you.” After her visit, he described

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himself as her “passionate paramour” and told her that she had grown “prettier” since their marriage: “Your hair is longer and darker and your eyebrows are darker, and you are ever so much straighter and fuller limbed.” Soon after, Elizabeth told Thomas that she was pregnant again.⁴⁶ The Kanes thus seem to have implemented Elizabeth’s theory of women’s rights, marital sexuality, and childbearing since after the birth of Elisha in 1856. Their detailed conversations over these issues give insight not only into their personal relationship, but also into larger cultural dialogues over fashion, sexuality, and family life. The plan perhaps resulted from, and definitely sometimes caused, tensions in their private relationship; nevertheless, these tensions should not be overemphasized. Thomas and Elizabeth were devoted to each other, as evidenced by the constant, lengthy, affectionate letters that flowed between them whenever he was away from home. A teenage bride, Elizabeth clearly felt like a very junior partner in their relationship in its beginning. As strong-willed as her husband, she gradually gained the confidence to assert herself (not only on this theory but in a host of other areas) in their relationship; as she became his equal, Thomas relied on her advice and support. Although the Kanes privately practiced Elizabeth’s plan to space their children, they never publicly agitated for the reform of marriage along the lines she suggested. Ironically, her only published writing during Thomas’s life—an 1874 book on the Latter-day Saints—defended women in polygamous relationships, the very system that once prompted her to elaborate her “Theory.” Nevertheless, Thomas’s marriage to Elizabeth related to his reform projects in several ways. As a partner in his reforms, she supported and participated in his efforts to grapple with the effects of urban poverty on children and teenagers. Her decision to attend medical school on Thomas’s advice reinforced his identity on the margins of respectable reform. In addition, Thomas and Elizabeth encouraged each other to take more radical stands on issues of gender, marriage, and family. The Kanes conducted this cluster of reforms primarily out of the public eye. In 1857, though, Thomas found himself in the midst of a maelstrom that would make him a national celebrity.

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The Utah War, Act I

Conflicts that threaten, but ultimately fall short of, war quickly fade from memory. There are no heroes to revere, no commemoratory speeches to make, no battlegrounds to hallow. But these “wars” can be tremendously revealing of a society’s assumptions, attitudes, and priorities. In 1857, newly inaugurated president James Buchanan, upon receiving reports of an alleged Mormon rebellion against federal authorities in Utah, dispatched an army (eventually led by future Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston) with the limited goals of replacing Brigham Young as governor of Utah and compelling the Saints’ submission to national power. In a broader sense, though, the episode—known as the Utah Expedition or the Utah War—was made possible by the national antagonism toward Mormonism. Indeed, Buchanan’s decision to send an army to Utah, with popular acclaim and bipartisan support, illustrates the limits of nineteenthcentury American tolerance of religious difference. Dissent was acceptable within certain boundaries, and heated infighting flourished within American Protestantism during the antebellum era. However, the denial of certain fundamental cultural values, particularly republican government and monogamous family structure, placed Mormons outside of these boundaries and rendered them a target for federal action.¹ The meaning of the Utah War to Americans in the 1850s has been obscured by the shooting war that began at Fort Sumter three years later. Historians typically view the 1850s as the prelude to war; events of that decade must be either preparatory to the sectional conflict or stricken from the textbooks. Such has been the fate of the largely forgotten Utah War, the largest military expedition between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, even though at the time the conflict captured Americans’ attention and imagination as much as

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the events in Bleeding Kansas. Moreover, the events in Utah and Kansas were not unrelated. The oncoming sectional crisis provided the context in which the embattled Buchanan administration decided to send the federal army. Some politicians at the time explicitly connected the two, suggesting that Buchanan’s administration cynically saw Utah as a diversionary tactic from the Kansas maelstrom. Robert Tyler, son of former president John Tyler and a prominent Pennsylvania Democrat, urged Buchanan to move against Mormon Utah in April 1857: “I believe that we can supersede the Negro-Mania [in Kansas] with the almost universal excitement of an Anti-Mormon Crusade.” The Utah Expedition promised to unite a nation increasingly divided over slavery.² For most Americans, however, an “Anti-Mormon Crusade” had a logic independent of sectional animosity. Many followed Buchanan in advocating a military response to quell the Saints’ reported defiance of federal authority. Nevertheless, most Americans supported the Utah War because of their animosity toward Mormonism. Driven in large part by the culture of evangelical religion and reform, American ministers, politicians, and newspapers focused as much on Mormon religion—especially polygamy, theocratic ambitions of the hierarchy, and allegations of religiously inspired violence—as they did on the treatment of federal officials and the rule of law in Utah. In the name of reform, evangelicals campaigned for a swift, decisive, coercive, and, if necessary, violent solution to the Mormon Question. For Kane, the Utah War raised fundamental questions about the toleration of religious difference in a pluralistic democracy. From his earliest association with the Mormons, Kane foresaw a potential collision between the Saints and the nation that might provoke the federal government to send an army against them. He feared such a possibility in 1846, and during the controversy involving the “runaway” officials in 1851–52, Kane worried that “a Proconsul, and at least one Regiment of Dragoons or Mounted Rifles” might be sent to Utah.³ When such a crisis occurred in 1857–58, he traveled to Utah, with private support from Buchanan, and orchestrated a truce between federal officials and Mormon leaders. Ultimately, Kane helped preserve peace in Utah, though the question of the boundaries of acceptable religious dissent in the United States remained (indeed, remain) unresolved. The war’s consequences long reverberated in Mormon and western history, reinforcing the Saints’ sense of persecution and setting the stage for another five decades of clashes between the Mormons and the federal government. Nevertheless, Kane’s mediation ensured that the Mormon Question would be solved in the courts and Congress, not on the battlefield. Kane’s intervention required all of his creative powers. His personal qualifications—well-known devotion to the Mormons, social status, and allegiance to the

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Democratic Party—uniquely positioned him as the only American of prominence who could claim credibility with both the Saints and the Buchanan administration. Furthermore, his wanderlust and daring (or reckless) personality conditioned him to undertake a perilous journey from which most of his friends and family tried to dissuade him. His sense of himself as a romantic reformer also propelled his mission. “Others,” he wrote in his diary, “may respect me less for being alone in the defence of a despised and injured people—but I respect myself more.”⁴ A conversion to Christianity before his departure convinced Kane that God mandated his intercession for peace. Envisioning himself as shaping events from behind the scenes, Kane concocted elaborate plots that mixed intrigue with manipulation. He carefully constructed narratives that at times bore little relation to reality but yet proved tremendously influential, as he spun the government’s actions to the Saints and the Mormons’ positions to Buchanan, new Utah governor Alfred Cumming, and the press. Kane’s own exact view of events is difficult to decipher, as he purposely obscured his personal role and deftly acted as an agent for both the Buchanan administration and the Mormons. Although he sought to protect Mormon liberties, he did not simply follow the Mormon party line. Rather, he viewed himself as mediating between the excesses of both sides, as he saw the Mormons as rebellious schoolchildren who needed reproving and the government as a cruel schoolmaster who needed tempering.⁵ During the conflict, he acted as an adviser and ghostwrote letters for both Young and Cumming. After the war, affectionate letters passed between him and Young, carefully plotting strategy, while he publicly claimed to desire an end to his association with the Saints. Publicly, Kane praised Buchanan and Cumming, while privately he saw himself and Young as the true peacemakers. Baffled, the national press engaged in a lively debate over his true intentions—whether he acted as an official government agent, a humanitarian acting on his own principles, or a Mormon spy. Preferring to pull levers from out of view, Kane ironically found himself a celebrity after the Utah War, though he obstinately refused to capitalize on his newfound fame. While the documentary record is voluminous, it must be handled with care, not only to separate Kane’s spin from reality, but also to investigate the meaning and power of the narratives he created. After Kane’s campaigns on behalf of the Saints during the late 1840s and early 1850s, his involvement with the Mormons dwindled. Other priorities— antislavery, marriage and children, his legal career—occupied most of his attention during the 1850s. At least a few Mormon leaders stated, perhaps with some cause, that Kane’s distaste for plural marriage led him to distance himself. In December 1857, Utah congressional delegate John Bernhisel commented that

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FIGURE 7. Thomas Kane in 1859. (Reproduced by permission from the Ronn Palm Collection, Museum of Civil War Images, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.)

Kane “of late years has treated us very coldly; we think on account of our religion which we all very much regret.” Bernhisel’s assessment exaggerated Kane’s detachment from the Saints (and may merely have been a ruse to convince outsiders of his continued status as a disinterested humanitarian). Throughout the 1850s, Kane kept up a warm correspondence with Young and tried to intervene politically for the Mormons at various times. Young hoped that Kane would use his press contacts to place Mormonism within the context of reform. If Horace

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Greeley could “once get a glimpse at the truth and recognise in our system a great moral and social reform,” Young thought “he might perhaps advocate our admission” as a state.⁶ Kane particularly lobbied to influence the selection of Utah territorial officials. In 1854, President Franklin Pierce considered replacing Young as governor. Rumors abounded that Pierce would select a non-Mormon, most probably Lieutenant Colonel Edward Jenner Steptoe, then in Utah en route to California with three hundred soldiers and civilians. Though severely ill, Kane pleaded with Pierce to reappoint Young. He starkly presented Pierce’s dilemma: “accepting the unanimous choice of a large American constituency” or “adopting the principle of monarchy and centralism by naming a Viceroy or Governor-General over the Mormons as a subject people.” As no faithful Saint would accept the governorship in Young’s place, Pierce would be forced to decide between “some Utah dissident or excommunicated unfortunate” or a non-Mormon. The Saints would ardently oppose the former course, and Utah held little draw for qualified outsiders (especially since former officials had already glutted the market with Mormon exposés). Furthermore, Young’s polygamy should not disqualify him, Kane wrote, as it was a purely private, religious matter. Kane thus shrewdly appealed to two fundamental Democratic principles: local self-government and religious liberty. Given his refusal to interfere with southern slavery and his protection of the religious rights of Catholics, Pierce’s own principles naturally dictated Young’s reappointment. Such a move would not only retain an effective governor, Kane reasoned, but would implement key tenets of the antebellum Democracy.⁷ Eager to benefit from Kane’s political connections and experience on a more consistent basis, Young asked him in October 1854 to become Utah’s congressional delegate as well as Young’s personal “business agent at Washington.” Bernhisel quickly assured Kane of his willingness to step aside. Should Kane accept, Young would provide him with traveling expenses to establish Utah residency and arrange the election (“you know this people well enough to be certain that they will vote as they may be counselled”). Kane refused, both praising Bernhisel’s effectiveness and asserting that an official connection with the Mormons would diminish his ability to help the Saints, which depended on his image as an impartial outsider. While declining Young’s offer, Kane continued to lobby for his reappointment; when the dust settled, Steptoe had rejected the nomination and Young remained in his post without an official reappointment.⁸ A series of other irritants—continued uproar over plural marriage, conflicts over Indian affairs, complaints over mail service—troubled Mormon-federal relations even in the comparatively peaceful period between 1852 and 1855. The

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deaths of two of the three territorial federal justices in 1855, both of whom had proved friendly to the Saints, heightened tensions, as the new appointees, particularly William W. Drummond, clashed immediately with the Mormons. Besides offending local sensibilities by sharing his judicial bench with a prostitute he had brought from Washington after abandoning his family, Drummond tried to restrict the powers of Utah’s probate courts. Seemingly an arcane battle over judicial jurisdictions, Drummond’s efforts directly challenged the Saints’ domination of Utah, as the territorial legislature had given the Mormon-controlled probate courts exceptional authority over criminal and civil matters, allowing the Saints to bypass the territorial federal courts on most issues.⁹ Other disputes between outside federal officials, who now held most of the important Utah positions, and Mormon leaders also increased tensions. Appointees claimed the Saints undermined the relationship of Indians with the federal government and obstructed federal surveys of Utah lands (which Mormons feared could be used as a pretext for mass evictions as Utah’s residents were technically still squatters). In 1856, a religious revival ignited by Kane’s former coauthor Jedediah M. Grant, now a member of the First Presidency, blazed through Utah. Known as the Reformation, the movement accelerated Mormons’ separatist tendencies and predisposed them even further to view events through an apocalyptic lens. The Mormon mindset of persecution, their millennial worldview, and the fiery rhetoric of their leaders created a cauldron of suspicion, fear, and resistance in Utah. The final straw for many of the federal officials came on the night of December 29, 1856, when Mormons raided the office of one of Drummond’s associate justices, excommunicated Saint George P. Stiles, who had also tried to wrestle control of the local judiciary away from Mormon hands. Stiles arrived to find at least some of his judicial papers and law books smoldering in his privy, while the Mormons had disappeared with the rest. As in 1851, an exodus of federal officials ensued; by April 1857, all but one of the key non-Mormon officials had left. Most returned to Washington, where they fed an eager press and public a steady diet of stories of Mormon atrocities. Led by Drummond, the officials alleged the existence of a Mormon rebellion that had defied their authority and threatened their lives.¹⁰ Kane heard the Mormon perspective when Young sent him two letters in January 1857 complaining about the federal officials and, with more faith than foresight, expressing hope that the incoming Buchanan administration, to which he presumed Kane had close ties, would prove friendly to the Saints. After asking Kane to lobby the new administration to allow him to remain governor, Young blamed the current friction on the outside officials. In his view, they came to Utah feeling “they are ‘some pumpkins,’—big with the idea of office, they come

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to accept the homage and most humble duty of the people instead of identifying their interest with them.” Among his long list of complaints, Young charged that the officials abused their powers, cheated the Saints, tried to take Mormon mistresses, were frequently absent, used their patronage to turn Native Americans against the Mormons, and published “every idle report” about the Saints “for the entertainment of the wiseacres at Washington.” “If they had the power,” Young concluded, they “would cut our throats.” Even the few friendly officials had proved deficient as they “are unacquainted with our ways” and “are bound up in strong traditions, forms, and technicalities.” Reflecting the Mormons’ growing defiance, Young threatened: “Why not kick them out of the Territory say you? That’s just it, we intend to, the very first opportunity.” In Young’s mind, only statehood—with its election of local officials—or the consistent appointment of Mormons to the territorial positions would solve the constant discord.¹¹ Young’s request for Kane’s assistance arrived at a particularly inopportune moment. Elisha, triumphant after the reception of his wildly popular book on his Arctic travels, had traveled to England in October 1856 to save his rapidly failing health. By November, he had weakened and sailed for Cuba where Thomas met him on Christmas Day. Jane and John Jr. also went to Havana, and the trio anxiously watched as Elisha lingered before dying on February 16, 1857. An instant outpouring of grief swept through the United States, and the slow procession of Elisha’s body home to Philadelphia, accompanied by Thomas and other family members, became a major cultural event. Newspapers covered the event in minute detail, cities competed to host ever more elaborate ceremonies, and huge numbers of Americans mourned the fallen hero, stricken down in his prime. Though Elisha added little of lasting value to scientific knowledge, he had captured (with the help of his brother’s promotions) the nation’s imagination and was extolled as a “true martyr to science.” Following major stops in New Orleans, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Baltimore, the Kanes finally arrived in Philadelphia on March 12 where Elisha’s body lay at Independence Hall before its interment. One banner proclaimed the dominant mood, “Science Weeps, Humanity Weeps, the World Weeps.”¹² Elisha’s death spun Thomas into a depression and diverted his attention away from Mormon affairs during the crucial months of Buchanan’s decision-making. Apparently to vindicate his brother’s theories of the Arctic, including the existence of an open sea at the North Pole, Thomas proposed an Arctic voyage for himself in late March. Shocked, the Kanes dissuaded him. John Jr. lauded Thomas’s “big soul” but cautioned that it “would kill him to go.” In April and May, Elizabeth chronicled her husband’s descent into depression. She painfully noted, “Tom looks worse and worse as the weeks go by,” though she prayed, “Oh

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my darling, may God bring you out of this fiery furnace of trouble a happy Christian.”¹³ While Elisha’s death initially distracted Thomas from the Utah crisis, it may have spurred his later actions. Feeling the weight of carrying on the Kane name after living his entire life in Elisha’s shadow may have disposed him to pursue his course in the Utah War (which most of his family and friends viewed as foolhardy). Elisha had first come to the nation’s attention, through Thomas’s unrelenting marketing, after embarking on a dangerous assignment as carrier of a secret presidential message from James Polk to his military commanders in Mexico during the negotiations to end the Mexican-American War. Not coincidentally, Thomas left on a similar mission—complete with presidential instructions, mystery, a hazardous journey, and opportunities for heroism—the same year the nation mourned his older brother. Though preoccupied with the aftermath of Elisha’s death, Thomas made some attempts to lobby Buchanan in March. While Young expected that Kane would wield substantial influence on Buchanan, the Kanes had actually been longtime rivals of Buchanan in Pennsylvania politics. As leaders of different branches of the Pennsylvania Democracy, John Kane and Buchanan had a combative political history. The two men respected each other—Buchanan described John as a “respectable & intelligent man” and as a “gentleman and a man of honour”—and they collaborated at times. For the most part, however, they clashed. Thomas recognized that Buchanan “had never known [me] except as his opponent in our State.”¹⁴ Inaugurated in March 1857, Buchanan felt considerable pressure to confront the problems in Utah. During the 1856 campaign, Republicans had tied together the “twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy—that both nationalized the Mormon Question and entangled it with sectional politics. As Kansas bled, Republicans tried to taint the Democratic principle of popular sovereignty by connecting it with polygamy. A tough stance on Utah by a Democrat like Buchanan would mute Republican attacks and protect the broader principle of popular sovereignty from association with polygamy and Mormonism. As the complaints of Utah’s territorial officials captured the attention of the press and public, politicians of both parties flocked to the anti-Mormon standard. Even Democratic senator Stephen Douglas, a former ally of the Mormons, called for Congress to “apply the knife and cut out this loathsome, disgusting ulcer.”¹⁵ To counteract this groundswell, Kane echoed to Buchanan Young’s complaints about the “misconduct” of Utah’s officials. Appealing to the president’s pragmatic side, he argued that the Saints were ideally situated to assist with the construction of a transcontinental railroad, a “possible achievement for your administration.” While admitting that the Utah problems were “vexatious and in-

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tricate” as well as politically treacherous, Kane asked Buchanan to consult with him “before taking order upon the affairs of Utah.” Recognizing the difficulty of securing Young’s wish of a full slate of Mormon officials, Kane concentrated once again on securing the governorship. He also used his ties with the new attorney general, Jeremiah Black, a Pennsylvania Democrat and a friend of Judge Kane, to urge Young’s reappointment and to discredit Drummond and the other territorial officials. However, the political atmosphere conspired against Kane’s attempts to sway public policy. Mormon William Appleby, an experienced observer of the national political scene, reported to Young, “I have never perceived such an acrimonious spirit prevailing against the Mormons.”¹⁶ Kane’s lobbying abruptly ended when he “considered himself insulted” by the Buchanan administration. He believed that unnamed anti-Mormons within the administration had turned over to the press his correspondence with the president. Indeed, the New York Times published a scathing front-page letter on Kane written by “Verastus,” a correspondent from Washington generally believed to be Drummond, who clearly had access to Kane’s letter. Dismissing Kane as a “young man” who had been “cajoled and fed and pampered by the Mormons,” Verastus charged that he had consistently misrepresented Mormonism to the nation. Furthermore, his knowledge of the current situation was second-hand, filtered through Mormon leaders, and belied by the experience of the federal appointees. “Certainly nothing but a blind and fanatical zeal for a false doctrine, and false devotion to false believers,” Verastus railed, could explain Kane’s actions. Verastus concluded with a threat: “As soon as he lectures the President on his duties on Mormonism, I may refer to him again, but trust the necessity will not exist.” Blaming (probably with good reason) the negative press on opponents within Buchanan’s administration, Kane interpreted the situation as a “personal indignity” to his honor and temporarily cut his ties with the administration.¹⁷ Nevertheless, Buchanan did not lack for advisers; within his cabinet, Secretary of War John B. Floyd led those who argued for forcible action, while Attorney General Black spoke for moderates who favored a more conciliatory approach. Buchanan, however, did not send an official investigation to determine the extent of the Mormon “rebellion,” nor did he consult with army general in chief Winfield Scott until mid-to-late May or with congressional leaders (in recess from early March to early December) at all. Remarkably, Buchanan made no public statement on Utah until his first presidential message in December 1857. Much earlier, by late March or early April, he had probably opted for an aggressive position—to replace Young and appoint a new slate of federal officials to be escorted to Utah by a federal army—and he solidified his plans in May. Several factors motivated Buchanan. The national outcry over Mormon polygamy

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and theocracy established the necessary context. In addition, the opportunity to protect the principle of popular sovereignty, which Republicans had tried to undercut by linking slavery with polygamy, proved attractive. Finally, the charges of Utah’s territorial officials, and the resulting pressure from the nation’s newspapers, catalyzed Buchanan’s decision.¹⁸ On May 21, Kane warned Young of the impending crisis. “We can place no reliance upon the President,” as “he succumbs in more respects than one to outside pressure.” Indeed, Kane scorned, “Buchanan has not heart enough to save his friends from being thrown over to stop the mouths of a pack of Yankee editors.” He hoped to persuade Buchanan to postpone the appointment of a new governor until after the summer, though Buchanan was actively seeking candidates. By July, after several more prominent candidates refused the position, Buchanan selected Alfred Cumming, a fifty-five-year-old Georgian who had been mayor of Atlanta, a sutler in the Mexican-American War, and superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis. The president’s Post Office Department also canceled the mail contract of the Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company, a new firm designed to carry both mail and goods between Missouri and the Salt Lake Valley into which the Saints had sunk tremendous resources over the previous year.¹⁹ As Buchanan dispensed orders and the army began preparations, Kane and his family left for the Alleghenies, arriving in late June, where they spent the summer seemingly unencumbered by worries about Utah. After receiving Kane’s letter warning of possible federal action, Young replied in late June. Blaming the agitation on Drummond and “some two or three irresponsible and anonymous letter writers” in Utah who had “humbugged” the press, he predicted that the affair would blow over once “they find that Mormon hierarchy has not slain all the respectable gentry or Mormon oppression had pressed them out.” Federal troops “will find nothing to fight if they come.” Even so, the Saints feared that the government would refuse to “extend their favorite doctrine of popular sovereignty to Utah” and would instead “operate against us upon the charges of rebellion, insubordination &c all of which I need not tell you are foul and malignant falsehoods.”²⁰ While Kane’s letter gave Young a sense of Buchanan’s direction, confirmation of the president’s decision arrived in Utah in dramatic (perhaps staged) fashion as the Saints gathered to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their arrival in the Salt Lake Valley at a gathering up Big Cottonwood Canyon. Mormon leaders struck a defiant stance, spurred by a millennial belief that Buchanan’s actions would catalyze the destructive events immediately preceding Christ’s Second Coming. Heber C. Kimball, a member of the First Presidency, exclaimed: “God Almighty

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helping me, I will fight until there is not a drop of blood in my veins. . . . I have wives enough to whip out the United States.” Since Buchanan had not officially notified Young of his replacement, Young seized on the legal technicality to declare the federal troops to be illegitimate, order the Saints to take defensive actions, and proclaim martial law. He recalled Mormon missionaries and Saints in outlying settlements like San Bernardino, California, and Carson Valley, Nevada (then western Utah). The territorial militia, known as the Nauvoo Legion, began stockpiling weapons and constructing fortifications in the canyons descending into Salt Lake City. As the rhetoric of defiance soared, a branch of the Mormon militia in southern Utah, acting without orders from leaders in Salt Lake City and assisted by local Indians, attacked a wagon train of Arkansas emigrants headed for southern California and slaughtered more than 120 individuals, sparing only small children, in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.²¹ Meanwhile, the Utah Expedition left Fort Leavenworth in mid-July, hoping to march into Salt Lake City before winter. In September, an army officer traveled ahead to Utah to obtain quartermaster contracts, but he left empty-handed and convinced of the Mormons’ determination to resist interference. To hamper the army’s advance, units of the Nauvoo Legion harassed the troops by burning supply trains and prairie grass needed for the army’s animals. Besides these delaying tactics, the military’s intention to reach Utah before winter was doomed by a late start, bureaucratic bungling, and lack of effective leadership until the arrival of Albert Sidney Johnston (though appointed in August, Johnston did not reach his troops until November). The federal army established winter quarters in present-day Wyoming at Camp Scott near Fort Bridger (which Mormon soldiers, claiming legal ownership of the fort, had torched). Embarrassed by the Mormons’ raids and huddled near the burned ruins during a frigid winter on half-rations, the soldiers could do little but vow revenge on the Saints.²² Kane later admitted that he had underestimated the seriousness of the Utah situation during the summer of 1857. Upon arriving in Philadelphia for the winter on October 3, he found a letter from Samuel W. Richards, a trusted Saint whom Young had sent to visit Kane the previous month. Kane later recalled his surprise at learning from Richards’s message that the “Mormons were determined to resist our troops and were, the most staid and reliable men among them, in an exceedingly unhappy and distempered state of mind.” In his accusations of government persecution and avowals of resistance, Richards reflected the Saints’ current mood, which starkly contrasted with Young’s June letter. Richards groaned that the “extremely hostile” nation would “in all probability . . . make an effort to break us up in the Mountains.” The Saints, he declared, would “never submit” to interference with their religion, and the government’s

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policy would “hasten the day when our oppressors shall cease to have power over us.”²³ Young also wrote Kane in September and sounded similar themes. Portraying the Mormons as aggrieved victims, he exclaimed that Buchanan’s administration had trampled the Constitution in its campaign to crush the Saints. Young wrote of the Mormon resolve to resist “to the last extremity” the nation’s attempts to quash their religious liberty and “hang, shoot, burn, debauch, lay waste, drive and destroy us as in times past.” Young’s millennialism contributed to his mindset, and he invited Kane to ride out the coming storm with the Saints. If the government attacked Utah, God’s vengeance would “also break upon the whole Country . . . Then come with all your household and receive the just recompense of daring to speak, act and feel in behalf of an innocent but much abused people.” On the day Young composed this letter—one day after the Mountain Meadows Massacre but before news of it had arrived in Salt Lake City—he also wrote to Mormon Jeter Clinton in Philadelphia. The contrast between the two letters indicates that Young still perceived Kane as an outsider. To Clinton, Young even more militantly warned that if he stopped restraining the Native Americans of the West, “the war cry will resound” and transcontinental migration west of the Missouri River would come to a halt. What Young told Clinton (but not Kane) was that the federal government would have to make peace with the Saints or face the “knife and tomahawk” of the Indians.²⁴ In early November, Kane visited Buchanan in Washington but found the president “reluctant to admit that he had committed any error.” Buchanan brushed aside Kane’s warnings of the potentially disastrous consequences of a military engagement. Kane toyed with the idea of traveling to Utah but concluded “that it was too late in the Season.” Financial and family pressures also engrossed Kane’s attention during the fall. The nationwide financial panic of 1857 reduced his own diminishing resources; on October 26, Elizabeth wrote, “Tom and I have been fretting about the way to live.” Kane had still hoped to undertake an Arctic expedition, but the crisis delivered a “crushing blow” to any possibility he could organize such a voyage. Furthermore, the panic triggered an emotional and physical breakdown of his merchant father-in-law William Wood, whose firm failed. To aid in Wood’s recovery, Thomas and Elizabeth insisted that he and his family temporarily move to Philadelphia, and the Woods stayed there from mid-November to mid-December. Kane’s health problems also flared, and Elizabeth noted his “wretched health” and the “strain he had given his back in lifting, so that he often fainted with the pain!”²⁵ Elizabeth did not write in her diary from November 3 to December 24, when she recorded, “I cannot write about all the horrors we have passed through since

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I wrote last.” Even so, “God has mercifully brought out of them one great blessing already, in uniting Tom and me in the bonds of a common faith.” Thomas’s conversion to Christianity occurred in the opening stages of a much-vaunted religious revival that swept large northern cities, including Philadelphia, in late 1857 and 1858. Often labeled a “businessmen’s revival,” it brought large numbers of urban, professional men, like Thomas, into the churches. Any connection with the revival, however, remains conjecture. In all the voluminous records Elizabeth and Thomas kept, neither detailed the events that prompted his religious change, except to assert a vague connection with Wood’s breakdown. Juxtaposed against their usual loquaciousness, this silence raises intriguing questions. Had Kane, so suspicious of evangelicalism, become caught up in a revival? Had he finally capitulated to the combined entreaties of Elizabeth and her father? Did the potential dangers of the journey to Utah he was considering stimulate soul-searching? More cynically, had he converted to win Elizabeth’s support for a quixotic adventure in the dead of winter? The exact combination of larger context, family pressures, mystical experience, intellectual assent to Christian doctrine, and concern for his personal mortality remain unknowable. But both Thomas and Elizabeth saw his conversion as genuine and interpreted his intervention in the Utah War as divinely inspired.²⁶ As Wood’s condition improved, Kane’s thoughts again turned westward. News of the Nauvoo Legion’s successful raids against the military’s supplies and the realization that the army would not reach Utah that winter had created an uproar and raised the specter of real bloodshed. Buchanan thus asked Congress to send four more regiments to Utah in his annual address on December 8, and the chain of events prompted Kane to resurrect his plan to travel there. The day after Buchanan’s address, U.S. Attorney James C. Van Dyke, a Philadelphian and one of the president’s closest advisers, wrote Buchanan urging consideration of Kane’s plans. Van Dyke announced Kane’s offer “to make an expedition to Salt Lake this winter, even at his own expense, if hostilities have not advanced to such a point as would render useless any efforts on his part.” Citing Kane’s experience in a similar quasi-governmental role during Polk’s administration, Van Dyke optimistically noted Kane’s influence with Young and the Mormons. He encouraged Buchanan to consult with Kane, who “is full of courage, and if his judgment is correct, he may be able to avert a war of extermination against a poor deluded race.”²⁷ On December 23, Kane and Van Dyke left for Washington to meet with Buchanan personally. Elizabeth recorded, “Tom thinks he may be of service to Him by bringing about a peace between Utah & the U.S.” Van Dyke met first with Buchanan, who skeptically questioned Kane’s plan, calling it “fraught with

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dangers and difficulties on all sides,” especially since he doubted that Kane could reach Utah that winter. Pressing for support, Van Dyke informed Buchanan that Kane had decided to go regardless of the president’s approval, though his success might depend on the “sanction and approbation of the Administration.”²⁸ On Buchanan’s request, Van Dyke and Kane visited Bernhisel, who expressed his own qualms about Kane’s proposal. Bernhisel told Kane that he feared the Mormons in the “outer settlements” had “arrived at such a point of hostility to the United States that they would sacrifice you if they discovered your design in visiting them.” Kane’s safety would be assured only if he reached Salt Lake, because of the “kind feelings of Gov. Young and the better class of the people towards you personally.” While the delegate favored a conciliatory approach, he worried that his coreligionists would “resist to the last.” The Mormons, Bernhisel predicted, would avoid pitched battles but continue to attack the army’s supplies, “and by various annoyances to our army keep up a protracted war and greatly embarrass this Government.” Bernhisel and Van Dyke agreed such a course would “eventually prove disastrous to the Mormon people.” Bernhisel, however, gave Kane a slight hope for success, as there “was no person here nor there who could exercise such a wholesome influence.” Even so, he lamented Kane’s timing. Earlier intervention by Kane might have persuaded the Saints “to return to their allegiance to the U.S.,” but the preparations for war had hardened the Mormons’ position and the window of opportunity, in Bernhisel’s view, had likely passed. “So great was the danger” that Kane, despite the slender hopes, was not “justified in making the effort.” Seizing on Bernhisel’s few positive comments, Van Dyke reported back to Buchanan of Kane’s potential influence with the Saints and “made a favorable impression upon him [Buchanan].”²⁹ The day after Christmas, Kane accompanied Van Dyke to the White House. He recalled, the “President received me in a manner for which, thinking it over, I don’t intend to forget that I ought to be grateful.” Buchanan intimated some openness to Kane’s proposal but nevertheless urged him to “give up all thought of an enterprise which he assured him must be vain, rash and foolhardy and which promised no other possible result than the sacrifice of his own life which would be added to the weight of the public indignation against the unfortunate Mormons.” Elizabeth charged that Buchanan only “protested feebly” against Kane’s efforts, in reality hoping Kane could solve his predicament. Fearing the possible destruction of the army, Buchanan “saw that blame for pusillanimity would fall upon the Old Public Functionary [Buchanan’s nickname] who had hesitated so long and then acted so late.” In any case, Kane reiterated that he intended to travel to Utah and the “only question” for Buchanan was whether to equip him with the “proper means of influence there.” When Buchanan ac-

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quiesced and offered him an official appointment, Kane refused, explaining that a position as a “Government agent” would compromise his influence with the Saints. He also declined Buchanan’s suggestion to accept government compensation for his “services” or traveling expenses.³⁰ Kane envisioned himself as a broker between the Mormons and the federal government, rather than as an agent or advocate for either. According to Elizabeth, he pitied the Mormons and thought them unjustly accused. At the same time he felt that “Discipline must be maintained!” Like boys in school too long oppressed, they had mutinied. . . . They felt they were stronger than the miserable usher whose duty it was to enter that school-room and govern them—and whom they had locked up in the map closet. . . . To Colonel Kane was presented the problem whether he could induce the boys to open the door themselves, and admit the ushers of their own free will. He thought he could do it, but it must be in his own way. He would not have the boys’ fine spirit, which he admired, humbled. They must be treated as he thought fair.

In an effort to protect the Mormons’ “fine spirit” while encouraging them to admit Cumming and the army, Kane would carry the following peace proposal to Young: a pardon for the Mormons in exchange for accepting Cumming as governor and allowing the federal army to create a military camp in Utah. Should Kane fail, the unofficial nature of his mission would make it easy for Buchanan to disavow his efforts.³¹ On December 31, Buchanan sent Kane three letters. In the first personal letter, he again suggested a “reconsideration” of Kane’s plan but continued: “If you go, may Heaven protect you! The purity of your motives & the energy of your character are beyond all question.” In the second short letter of introduction, meant for federal officials, Buchanan directed any officers of the government he might encounter to assist him. The third and most extensive letter, designed for Mormon leaders, described Kane’s motivations as “pure philanthropy & a strong desire to serve the Mormon people.” As Kane had requested, Buchanan made clear that he traveled at his “own expense & without official position.” In Kane’s eyes, however, Buchanan went too far in distancing himself. He had asked Buchanan to include a clause promising that Kane’s “personal word would have great weight with you in your exercise of executive clemency,” a power Kane believed would allow him to “reward the deserving but also to menace the refractory.” Not only did Buchanan refuse to insert this clause, but he pronounced his disagreement with Kane’s belief that most Mormons “labor under a mistake” as to the government’s intentions.³²

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The Kane family reacted to Thomas’s decision as they had twelve years earlier to his plan to visit the Mormon camps in Iowa. Having already lost one son that year to romantic exploits, John strenuously opposed the plan. While Thomas would “carry with [him] all of blessing that a father’s prayers can invoke,” John blamed the Mormons for the conflict and doubted his son could persuade the Saints to back down from their bellicose position. He warned, “if the Mormons once assail our troops, the sentiment of the country will never be satisfied while a Mormon community survives on this continent.” As during the controversies over the Fugitive Slave Law, Thomas’s disregard for his father’s counsel became widely known. Thomas wondered whether his father’s opposition to his journey caused Buchanan’s letters to include “phraseology less definite than his oral pledges.” John chided his son, expressing surprise at the letters’ “strength,” given Buchanan’s “habitual caution.” Indeed, John wrote, had he been president, “I could not have committed myself, even to you, as fully as he has done.”³³ John Jr., then in Paris, called his brother’s plan “madness” and criticized “how little an idea Tom has of the responsibilities of a married man.” When he received confirmation of his brother’s intention, John Jr. softened somewhat, expressing “great confidence in Tom’s long head and unbounded energy.” John perceptively described his brother’s psychology: “Tom is never so well as when exposed to what would kill most men of his build, and that hard life in open air (no matter how hard) always agrees with him better than the most tranquil of sedentary existence.” Furthermore, Elisha’s death and Thomas’s inability to organize an Arctic expedition “were killing him by inches,” as “Tom’s big soul was preying on his body.” “He is too great a man to occupy himself with trifles,” and the Utah mission was “an object large enough and noble enough to draw his thoughts away from the poor self on which they were fading and I can’t help hoping that his physical man will improve in consequence.”³⁴ Elizabeth struggled with Thomas’s decision, though his religious conversion allowed her to reconcile herself to it. While Thomas was still in Washington, Elizabeth fretted about his possible departure, but she told God she would “yield my dear husband to Thy hands if Thou needest him to bring peace to those lost sheep of Israel” as “my Thank offering for Thy infinite goodness in making him a Christian.” When Thomas announced he would give up his clerkship and leave for Utah, Elizabeth gave her husband her “little Bible” and resigned herself: “God’s will be done.”³⁵ Notwithstanding her own doubts, Elizabeth bridled at the Kanes’ reaction to Thomas’s decision and their perception of her husband. The past summer, Thomas had researched railroad routes in the Alleghenies for the Sunbury and Erie Railroad Company, which would determine the value of the land his family

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owned in the region. Disappointed by his lack of time to finish his report to the company before his departure, Elizabeth worried, “There goes the labour, of mind and body, of Tom’s whole summer besides a considerable sum of money.” She feared that it would reinforce his family’s image of Thomas: “it will pass down as ‘one of Tom’s half-finished schemes,’ ‘one of the times when he has started with steam up on his hobby, worked too hard, and then abandoned it.’” To her diary, she argued, “Tom has plenty of perseverance, and I know how many things he has done—but who will remember these, if the reputation of this sort of saying sticks to him.” Thomas also defended himself, as he “made out for Pat a sheet full of reasons” for his decision, writing, “I cannot stand the thought that my little chicks may be taught that their father ran away and left them and their sainted mother—thoughtless of all duties which he owed them among others.”³⁶ When Kane departed for Utah on January 5, he traveled with a high sense of his mission and the desire to shroud his purposes in secrecy and mystery. A former black servant immigrating to California, Anthony Osborne, accompanied him, and Kane took Osborne’s name and posed as a Philadelphia botanist, Dr. Osborne. Besides his penchant for the dramatic, Kane traveled incognito because he feared his prominent association with the Mormons would impede his journey to Utah, given the heightened state of anti-Mormonism. Before his departure, he also prepared a cipher, using the Bible, that would allow him to safely send letters past prying eyes to his family (and on to Buchanan). So that he could meet with the Mormons before encountering the army and bypass snow, Kane traveled to Utah not by the overland route, but by sailing from New York City to Panama, crossing the isthmus by railroad, taking additional boats to San Francisco and then San Pedro and then traveling via the southern overland route from San Bernardino. By January 21, he had reached Acapulco, and he reported in a cipher letter to his father discouraging news from Utah via California newspapers: “I shall probably be too late to make peace, but not too late to prevent the spring massacre.” Along the way, seasickness gave Kane intense headaches and he temporarily lost sight in his left eye.³⁷ Kane reached San Francisco on January 28; disembarking at nine at night, he “drove crazily about the strange streets hunting for Mormons two hours before [he] found one,” since most of the Saints had heeded Young’s instructions to return to Utah. The accommodations he found at the “dirty frame house called Oriental Hotel” did not meet his accustomed standards. His dinner consisted of “slices of stale black beef, tallow cheese and cupboard stale soda biscuit” and a “poisonous drink” and he went “supperless to a mouldy bed.” The following morning, Kane left San Francisco aboard a “wretched boat . . . crowded with

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U.S. troops, like stock car with cattle.” The troops, mainly a mix of “the worst of Irish & the stupidest of Germans,” irritated Kane by “taking up every sheltered corner on the upper deck—a few of the choicest playing cards, the rest sea sick & disgusting—vomiting & swearing.” Some of the soldiers even speculated “of their going against the Mormons.” Kane groaned that the nation would “pay such for butchering our own citizens!”³⁸ After arriving in San Pedro, near Los Angeles, Kane traveled overland to San Bernardino, a once-thriving Mormon colony. Most of the faithful Saints had gone back to Utah, leaving only (in the words of a Mormon missionary a few years later) “apostate infidel Mormons, spiritualized Mormons, ‘Josephite’ Mormons, and a few well disposed, but lukewarm, and vacillating saints.” To find a Mormon escort to Utah, Kane wanted to “make the Anti-Mormons distrust him that their enmity might be a passport to the confidence of the Mormons.” Reports of the Mountain Meadows Massacre had whipped anti-Mormonism in San Bernardino, already potent, into fever pitch, and Kane succeeded too well in arousing suspicion. Concerned citizens formed a Vigilance Committee to investigate the strange botanist seeking to hire men to accompany him to Utah. A local Saint, Ebenezer Hanks, wrote that Kane’s “appearance has created an alarming excitement among the people,” who “adopted resolutions to resist the stranger, and know his designs, which they believed were strictly opposed to the views of the General Government and to prevent his passing through.” According to Elizabeth, when the committee visited Kane, his “bold front” successfully “bluffed them off,” and his explanations partly won over the local district attorney. Kane used harsher tactics with the head of the Vigilance Committee, a notorious anti-Mormon, “telling him that he had three fellows watching who would shoot if he made his appearance in the town that day.” Hanks painted a less dramatic portrayal, writing merely that Kane’s behavior “gained the applause of the respectable portions of this community.” Rather than threaten the committee’s leader, Kane convinced him after an hour-and-a-half meeting of his “integrity and uprightness,” which led to a unanimous resolution by the committee: “God speed Him.”³⁹ Thomas’s statements and Elizabeth’s diary contradict Hanks’s peaceful depiction. Kane referred to the Vigilance Committee as a “Lynch Committee” and a “mob.” Elizabeth recorded that Kane’s assurances and threats failed to satisfy the committee; believing that the house where he stayed “was entirely surrounded by spies,” he spent one night outdoors. Fortunately for Kane, Francis Jessie Clark—a former wife of Heber C. Kimball who had run away from polygamy with another man but remained a believer in Mormonism—recognized Kane from his sojourn with the Saints in 1846 and, unbeknownst to him, secured his

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belongings before the arrival of the Vigilance Committee. Haunted by a fear of hell, Clark told Kane, “If by saving you, I could do a service to God’s church on earth, I would feel that I did not need a drop of water to cool my tongue when I shall lift up my eyes being in torments.” Observing Kane’s “very poor” health, Clark and other local Saints found reliable Mormon escorts (including Clark’s current husband) and whisked him out of town. While at San Bernardino, Kane wrote home of his diminished hopes for peace: “The day may be, and probably is past to make peace, but not to save our poor fellows. Have no fear for my life, the cloud and pillar will be my escort. I swear I will arrive in time.”⁴⁰ With his small escort, Kane left San Bernardino on February 6, reaching Williams’ or Cottonwood Camp (near the Mormon settlement at present-day Las Vegas) on February 14, where Kane and his companions met Apostle Amasa Lyman with another group of Saints. Lyman then accompanied Kane, suffering from sickness, to Salt Lake City. The New York Tribune later dramatically reported that during his journey through the Mormon settlements, Kane “was repeatedly compelled to conceal himself under the merchandise conveyed by his companions, in order to avoid falling into the hands of outlying parties of Mormons, who would have killed him as a secret agent or spy of the Federal Government.” This seems doubtful; Kane journeyed with a Mormon apostle (though his continued disguise meant that most Saints would not have recognized him as their longtime defender). Nevertheless, as one of the first non-Mormon travelers through the region since the Mountain Meadows Massacre six months earlier, Kane likely found the local Mormons in southern Utah in a high state of tension and suspicion.⁴¹ On February 17, while in southern Utah, Kane, writing as Osborne, sent Young a letter that messengers hurried to Salt Lake City. “I trust you will recognize my handwriting,” he wrote. Kane urged Young “to postpone any military movement of importance until we meet and have a serious interview.” Raging snowstorms three days later hampered Kane’s advance but also convinced him of the impossibility of an imminent military movement (by either the Saints or the federal army). Even so, he continued to push on; “travelling both night and day,” he reached Salt Lake City on February 25.⁴² Young, who first learned of Kane’s mission from his letter the previous week, expressed his “joy and surprise” at Kane’s arrival. That evening, Kane met with a group of leading Saints (including the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve) at Young’s home. Apostle Woodruff described Kane as “very pale and worn down” and “very formal in his introduction.” Kane announced himself as an ambassador from Buchanan who was “fully prepared and duly authorised” to discuss the president’s position toward the Saints. Urging a conciliatory policy,

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Kane advised the Mormons to “think of our soldiers who are among the snows outside of these mountains” and “take immediate measures to insure their safety, supply their wants, and bid them all a cordial welcome to your hospitable valley.” Following his speech to the entire group, Kane requested a private interview with Young and the two left for a half hour.⁴³ During their personal meeting, Kane pressed his recommendations. Overstepping his authority, he offered Young the “personal apology of Mr. Buchanan” and agreed with the Saints’ assessment that the actions of the federal government had “been so precipitate as to be legitimately open to misconception.” However, Kane reasoned, “it ought never to be too late between persons of honor and good intentions to remedy a mere misunderstanding,” and he urged Young to “believe and to accept his assurance of the fact that no disrespect had at any times been contemplated or intended” by Buchanan. Young, however, rebuffed Kane’s attempts to satisfy him of Buchanan’s intentions and declared: “I should not turn to the right or left or persue any Course ownly as God dictated me.” Criticizing Buchanan’s “injudicious and hasty” actions, Young called the president a “man of straw” whose actions revealed that “he can act in blind conformity to the prejudices of others, if they are not to be believed his own.” Discouraged, Kane initially protested that Young’s obstinacy meant the failure of his own efforts. According to Young, Kane “finally said if I would dictate he would execute,” and Young assured him “as he had been inspired to Come here he should go to the armey and do as the spirit led him to do and all would be right.”⁴⁴ Following this private meeting, Kane returned to the larger group, balancing praise of the Saints (congratulating them on their “great empire” in Utah and their manly conduct in the current crisis) with acclaim for Buchanan (an “excellant President”). Young told Kane: “Brother Thomas the Lord sent you here and he will not let you die No you cannot untill your work is done. I want to have your name live with the Saints to all Eternity You have done a great work and you will do a greater work still.” Other Saints viewed Kane’s mission with substantially more skepticism. Apostle George A. Smith saw Kane (though a “warm friend”) as a pawn of Buchanan, who had cynically sent Kane to persuade the Saints to “not destroy” the soldiers at Camp Scott “until he [Buchanan] can get sufficient reinforcements to them to destroy us.” Smith succinctly rejected Kane’s conciliatory message: “Bah!”⁴⁵ Over the next few weeks, Kane made little progress with Mormon leaders as he prepared to travel to Camp Scott. He stayed first at William C. Staines’s newly constructed mansion and later at Young’s Lion House, where he experienced what “comfort and good living were.” On February 28, Young announced from the Tabernacle pulpit the presence of Dr. Osborne, a “gentleman from Washing-

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FIGURE 8. Brigham Young at age sixty-five in 1866. (Reproduced by permission from the Utah State Historical Society.)

ton.” Like Buchanan, Young distanced himself publicly from Kane (while meeting with him privately). Young explained, “His errand was of no particular moment to the people or himself; that he had come on his own responsibility and at his own expense, to see and learn the situation of affairs here.” While Kane counseled with Mormon leaders, he also found time to reminisce with Woodruff about “old times” and the “travels of Dr Kane in the polar regions,” and share scandalous tidbits with George A. Smith about the “fathers of the Revolution.”

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At some point, Kane asked “what would be the result if he spoke against the Mormons.” Heber C. Kimball ominously intoned that “his mind would become Barren” and he “would droop & die away. But as long as you will stand up for the truth you will be fruitful and feel well.”⁴⁶ Mormon leaders also justified their decision not to follow Kane’s advice and assist the army. Woodruff, for example, wrote Kane a letter (unfortunately lost) covering “6 pages of foolscap” “giving a reason of our hope and faith and the cause of our defending ourselves in these vallies of the mountains.” The Saints envisioned a nightmarish scenario, “Illinois & Missouri over again,” should the army enter Utah. Martial law would be proclaimed and the Mormons would be subject to the whims of the “drunken, quarrelsome and licentious” soldiers. Federal judges would persecute “the prominent men with arrests & prosecutions without end” and try them “with juries composed of enemies, and finally would call on the soldiers to see every man hanged the Saints loved.” To assuage their concerns, Kane promised Young and his “immediate friends” a presidential pardon and stated “upon my honor as a gentleman” that the federal army would not impose martial law. Kane gradually sensed a thaw in the Saints’ attitude. Young became more “frank and confidential . . . more independent of the fear that I would misconstrue [his statements] myself or misrepresent them to others.” Indeed, in Kane’s last few days in Salt Lake City, Mormon leaders discussed with him future projects, including the transcontinental railroad, a firm to carry the mails between Missouri and California, and Kane’s own proposal to build “Artesian wells at certain points along the Southern Desert route.”⁴⁷ Before leaving for the army camp, Kane, probably with Young’s assistance, prepared a report for Buchanan in which he first elaborated one of his principal themes of the conflict: the division of the Saints into a peace party led by Young and a war party that opposed any attempt at conciliation. Bernhisel had conditioned Kane to fear the zealotry of the “outlying” settlements, and Kane’s own experiences led him to perceive the existence of a division among the Mormons. The actual existence of a “war party,” however, seems doubtful. All contemporaneous reports of such a division stem from Kane, who never gave specifics on the war party’s leadership or composition. For Kane, the division reflected more than just his perception of the situation in Utah; it was also a deliberate rhetorical construction designed to lead to a peaceful settlement. Indeed, his consistent use of the narrative in both public and private statements suggests that it was a mixture of genuine belief, misperception, and calculated creation. Whatever his actual views, Kane used the narrative of a Mormon peace party and war party, with Young’s apparent consent, to transform the Mormon leader in Buchanan’s eyes from a dangerous fanatic to the crucial linchpin of any pos-

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sible diplomatic resolution. Though in reality Young had rejected his advice, Kane still assured Buchanan, “you will be rewarded for the humane efforts which you have made to avert the calamities of war,” as Kane’s “timely coming has prevented the effusion of blood, and contributed to strengthen the hands of those—and they are not few here—who seek to do good and . . . confirm the bands of the Union.” His arrival, Kane claimed, had tempered the Mormon war spirit and “operated emphatically to prevent an impeding movement hostile to our troops.” He strongly praised “the mistaken Brigham Young,” whose “commanding influence” and restrained rhetoric had controlled the “imprudent zeal” of the war party. In his telling, Kane credited Young with protecting the soldiers; during the winter, “there has not been an hour in which our army has not been in danger—though they have lived and slept in peace through the whole winter guarded by his arm.” Kane’s reports of such a division provided Buchanan with the intellectual fig leaf that would permit him to work with rather than prosecute Young.⁴⁸ While Kane journeyed to Salt Lake and negotiated with Mormon leaders, Elizabeth deeply felt his absence in Philadelphia. The day after his departure, she wrote, “I hope, I am sure, I did my duty to him in trying to help him and to be cheerful,” and she felt “quite cheery to think God has mercifully given me so many things to occupy me.” In the same entry, however, she noted that one-yearold “Elisha almost upset my attempts at composure today by struggling forward to go to his father’s room.” More practical than her husband, Elizabeth worried constantly about their finances and his future employment. She felt the ramifications of his decision immediately, as she had to “give up” one of her servants in late December 1857 (the other servant was released on March 1). On February 2, she had only nine dollars in ready cash and wrote, “I wish I could earn money!” Elizabeth defended herself to her journal: “It seems as if I were so extravagant to have used all Tom left with me, but every bill he left, has exceeded his estimate,” and she yet owed $140. While she waited for some payments due her husband, she had to rely on money from Pat, who (acting as Thomas’s attorney and accountant) refused to let her tap into stocks Thomas owned. Eager to make better use of her time, Elizabeth asked Judge Kane to recommend some “mental occupation for at least two hours a day” that would result in money or “some finished work.” A return to study medicine was not possible “without a master, and without models or pictures.” Judge Kane dissuaded her from taking on “copying, or other occupation producing money” and instead suggested she study mathematics. Elizabeth felt no such inclination but dutifully accepted his recommendation. She also read extensively, including several books on California, Utah, and Mormonism.⁴⁹

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In mid-February 1858, tragedy again struck the Kane family a year after Elisha’s death, as John contracted pneumonia. The family doctor warned that he would “certainly recover if he were a younger man, but as it is he has age and weakness against him.” By February 19, the family knew John was dying, and he succumbed two days later. Elizabeth cried: “Oh Tom, my poor Tom, how can you bear it! There is no way of breaking the shock to you, my darling.” If Thomas had remained in Philadelphia, she thought, the shock of his father’s death, given his “enfeebled” health, would have killed him. “So I must try to be grateful that you are away gathering strength for the battle.” Even so, Elizabeth’s vision of her husband receiving such news far from the comfort of home vexed her in the coming months. On June 5, she worried that he had delayed writing because “he has broken down under the shock.” A few days later, however, she received a letter and recorded: “He had heard the news, and wrote like a Christian should. My darling, my darling!”⁵⁰ John’s death threatened the future livelihood of both Thomas (formerly employed as his clerk) and Pat (whose law practice depended on his father’s position). As John lay dying, Elizabeth’s thoughts turned to the future; knowing they could not “Go West” while Jane lived, Elizabeth contemplated the idea of Thomas becoming the land agent for the McKean and Elk Company. Pat had a different scheme, and he and various family friends lobbied Buchanan to replace John with a personal ally. In such a scenario, Pat might “get the Reportership, Tom the clerkship, or that at least he will be a kind and friendly Judge.” In April, however, Buchanan appointed John Cadwalader; Elizabeth sighed, “No chance for Tom there.” Pondering her husband’s limited options (she ruled out legal work and full-time writing as damaging to his health), Elizabeth wondered whether she had acted wrongly in discouraging “Tom from a political career.” While she respected his patriotism, she concluded she “never could bear him to mix in party politics—vile they are.” Hoping that Thomas would not accept an “office as a reward from Buchanan,” Elizabeth declared that she would rather endure poverty and “leave an unspotted name to our children” than have her husband pursue politics, which would threaten his “physical and moral” health. Elizabeth turned to her faith for comfort: “as Tom gave up his employment for Christ’s sake, He will take care of him.”⁵¹ Throughout Kane’s absence, Elizabeth found solace in his conversion to Christianity. She exulted, “What a close tie it makes between us!” Though empowered to act as her husband’s guide in his new faith, she nevertheless worried that “Tom, a Christian and studying Christ’s word as his guide, will be farther than ever beyond me.” Reflecting on their married life, Elizabeth recognized that she had also changed religiously, as she used “to go twice a Sunday to

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church, to believe all clergymen right reverend, and all they said worthy of implicit credence . . . and to have a slight horror of all but Protestant Christians.” Her husband’s heterodoxy had increased her own toleration, and she mourned all the “petty persecutions I must have inflicted unconsciously on Tom.”⁵² Even with her strong belief in the divine inspiration behind Kane’s journey, Elizabeth still bemoaned his absence and anxiously awaited his return. On February 3, she wrote: “I try, for Christ’s sake, to relinquish you cheerfully, but it is a hard struggle. Last night I yielded to the temptation of recalling how tenderly you always cared for me when my head ached, how you would take off my shoes for me, and when I was in bed, come and lay your darling head by mine and soothe me to sleep with loving words. But I found I began to cry, so I forced my thoughts off.” In April she lamented: “I have been wearying for news from Tom. I am almost at the end of my slender stock of fortitude!” Her daily life, she wrote, “turns on the arrival of the ten a.m. and 5 p.m. trains by which newspapers come. There is no news, and I come back sick at heart. How long, how long!” She looked for all possible ways to send Thomas letters. A man “going to California” agreed to take a letter, as did a “Mormon who is going to try to get through the army.” She finally received letters from Thomas en route to Utah, including two in cipher, in April. Her inability to find the same edition of the Bible he had used for the cipher, as well as his “many mistakes,” caused Elizabeth, John Jr., and Pat to struggle over the letters for the next three days before they finally broke the code. In early May, when letters from Camp Scott dated March 3 arrived in the East with no mention of Tom, she “cried for hours like a coward,” fearing he had died. Two days later, Pat received a letter from Osborne with a California newspaper slip announcing Kane’s safe arrival in Salt Lake City. “So far, thank God, he is safe!” In late May, she referred to herself as “widowed” and worried that “absence may have cured him of his love for me. Even if he continues to love me—he has also learned to do without me.”⁵³ As Elizabeth fretted in Philadelphia, Thomas had completed the first portion of his journey by reaching Salt Lake City, proving Buchanan and Bernhisel incorrect. Though he had easily entered into the confidence of Mormon leaders, he had not persuaded them to send supplies to the army as a gesture of peace or abandon the course that promised a clash when the snows melted. The prospects for peace looked dim as Kane left on an equally difficult task, to somehow persuade either the military or civilian leaders at Camp Scott to signal a willingness to negotiate with the Saints.

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On March 8, 1858, Kane left Salt Lake City to travel through deep snows toward Camp Scott, escorted by a group of Mormon scouts led by the notorious Porter Rockwell. Over the next two months, he caused a furor within the army camp, clashed with Colonel Albert Johnston and other military officials, persuaded Governor Alfred Cumming to accompany him without the army to Salt Lake City, and brokered a settlement between Cumming and Brigham Young that foreclosed the possibility of armed hostilities. During the next two years, Kane worked behind the scenes to influence the press and President Buchanan to preserve his view of the proper resolution to the conflict, which rested on an alliance between Cumming and Young (to the exclusion of the army and other federal officials). Kane’s intervention proved crucial in avoiding a military clash between the Mormons and the federal army and in keeping the peace in the succeeding years.¹ Young’s defiant stance changed abruptly as Kane left for Camp Scott. The day before his departure, news reached Salt Lake City “of a massacre of the Saints” in Oregon Territory. In 1855, Young had sent a group of missionaries to establish a settlement at Fort Limhi along the Salmon River (in present-day Idaho), both to expand the northern boundaries of Mormon influence and to proselytize Native Americans. In April and May 1857, Young dramatically emphasized the colony’s importance. Though still recovering from a prolonged illness, Young invested five weeks in traveling to Fort Limhi with most of the senior leadership of the church, the only time he left Utah between 1848 and his death in 1877. Tensions with the local tribes, however, only increased with time. On February 25, 1858, a force of northern Shoshones and Bannocks (incited in part by a mountain man and, possibly, a government contractor buying cattle for the Utah Expedition)

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raided the settlement, killing two men and wounding several others. Messengers raced to Utah to raise a force to rescue the remainder of the Mormons.² Viewing it as a “small affair,” Kane seriously underestimated the importance of the news to the Saints. Rather, he thought the Mormon war faction “exaggerated [it] out of its true proportions,” using the event to further tar the federal government. However, the tidings shattered some of Young’s millennial expectations. He had considered Fort Limhi as a possible site of refuge or even way station to the Pacific Coast should the Saints be driven from Utah. In addition, he envisioned a possible alliance between the Mormons and western Indians against the federal army. Rather than protect the Saints, inspire Native Americans to join the Mormon cause, and preserve Oregon as a possible sanctuary or way station, God had allowed the settlers to suffer an ignominious defeat. The day after Kane’s departure, Young dispatched two messengers, including one of his sons, who rode “all night” to deliver a hurried proposal to him.³ Young’s letter, which he entrusted Kane to deliver to Johnston, offered the army substantial supplies—a herd of two hundred cattle and fifteen thousand to twenty thousand pounds of flour—as an olive branch to the military leaders. Writing to Buchanan, Kane portrayed the offer as the triumph of Young over the war party; he interpreted the letter’s implicit message as: “Go on. Things have not changed. I am still strong enough and confident enough of my power to wish and work for peace.” While Kane represented the letter to Buchanan as evidence of Young’s continuous desire for peace, in reality it reflected a change in Young’s thinking, spurred by the troubles at Fort Limhi. Whereas Young had initially spurned Kane’s suggestion that the Saints send supplies to the army as an overture for peace, he now adopted Kane’s plan as his own. Young’s attitude had shifted decisively from defiance to conciliation, and he began to search for any alternative to war. Kane’s mission now seemed the most promising way to avert the oncoming crisis.⁴ The atmosphere at Camp Scott, however, offered little hope for Kane’s success. After his arrival, Kane captured the mood in a report to Buchanan: A mixed society of about 2000 womanless men—soldiers officers teamsters professional gamblers and professional anti-Mormons had been feeding on hard beef whiskey and (a great deal tobacco) & camp followers had been compelled to halt within less than the distance between Philadelphia and Washington from the little capital where they had promised themselves . . . enjoyment and luxury and compelled to pass an entire winter in extreme discomfort and a state of idleness & inaction sufficiently shocking to contemplate. Imprisoned within their camp bounds . . . they cd. [could] do nothing against the Mormons. They cd. [could] only talk against them.

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Even the civil officials most inclined toward a peaceful solution railed against the Mormons. In early March, Jacob Forney, the new superintendent of Indian affairs who later became a staunch supporter of Cumming’s conciliatory approach, wrote to Attorney General Jeremiah Black that “Human Hystory furnishes no parallel to this system.” “True Mormonism,” in Forney’s estimation, consisted of polygamy, violence, and sedition. The army harbored even more ill will toward the Saints. Captain Jesse A. Gove reflected the entrenched antiMormonism of the troops; even before the winter, he asserted, “Murders are as common among them, to all those who do not bow to Mormondom, as the sun rises.” Johnston shared his troops’ animosity, ordered all Mormons to be “treated as enemies,” and ridiculed their “insane design of establishing a form of government thoroughly despotic, and utterly repugnant to our institutions.”⁵ Kane rode into this firestorm late on the night of March 12. So exhausted that he had to be lifted off his horse, he was taken to a tent and “fell immediately into a deep sleep.” News of the arrival of “no ordinary expressman” from Salt Lake, “well and warmly clad in furs,” swept through the camp. The next morning, reports spread, identifying the mysterious horseman as a brother of Elisha Kane, “that noble man whose name sends a thrill of pride and vain regret through the heart of every American citizen.”⁶ Kane made a dramatic appearance on horseback at Johnston’s tent that morning. Captain John W. Phelps, an artillery officer, described the scene: Kane, “without looking right or left . . . moved straight forward” to Johnston’s tent “and seemed as if he wished to ride into it instead of stopping out side, so near did he urge his horse to the opening.” When Johnston answered Kane’s call, he could only partially leave his tent, “being stopped apparently by the man’s horse whose head was nearly in the opening, and looking up in a crouched attitude, his own head being near the horse’s head.” Kane identified himself and asked Johnston’s permission to confer with Cumming, a request that Johnston granted. Phelps observed that Kane lacked “proper deference” for Johnston. Fitz-John Porter, Johnston’s adjutant and close friend, was similarly unimpressed by Kane’s “theatrical” antics, writing that while Kane supposed the soldiers to be “an admiring audience,” they were in reality “laughing at his conceit.” When Kane left, Porter snickered that he was “led—like an ass—because an ass.”⁷ Thus began a conflict between Kane and Johnston that simmered throughout his stay at the camp and became a wedge between the military officials and Cumming. Kane spent his first day closeted with Cumming, creating an intense curiosity around the camp. Since some recognized him as a famous, or infamous, Mormon sympathizer, any goodwill aroused by his relation to the fallen hero Elisha quickly dissipated. The camp debated whether he was a peace commis-

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sioner sent by Buchanan, an ally of the Mormons with forged credentials, or a “Mormon traitor and spy.” Jesse Gove wrote home: “My men want to hang him. Say he is a Mormon.” The following day, Cumming and Kane squashed some speculation by opening their discussions to Forney and Delana R. Eckels, Utah’s new chief justice, who confirmed Kane’s credentials and attested to his “honorable” intentions. Even so, the apparent growing alliance between the slight and effeminate Kane (Gove condescendingly called him the “immaculate Col. Kane”) and the rotund and ungainly Cumming became a source of constant camp gossip.⁸ The tensions between Kane and Johnston rapidly escalated until Kane challenged him to a duel, though the exact events are clouded by contradictory accounts. Johnston initially assigned an aide, Captain Cuvier Grover, to watch over Kane, both to protect him and his property “from violence, if he is a Mormon” and to “have an eye upon [his] movements.” After Cumming told Grover that Kane was an “accredited Agent,” Grover apparently abandoned attempts at surveillance. Porter explained that Johnston’s orderly (probably referring to Grover), who had been “in personal attendance” of Kane, said to another soldier sent to take his place, “keep an eye on the d+d Mormon.” Kane and Cumming overheard the remark, which Cumming viewed “as an intentional insult by Colonel Johnston to his guest, and hence to himself, and proposed to resort to a challenge.” Albert G. Browne Jr., a reporter for the New York Tribune, described the source of the conflict somewhat differently. According to him, Johnston sent an orderly to invite Kane to dinner—“no slight compliment in a camp where the rations were so abridged”—but the soldier defied orders and arrested Kane.⁹ In either case, Kane perceived the situation as more of an arrest than an invitation. He wrote, “The character of the invitation . . . was I believe regarded by those around me as an Arrest and a personal indignity of the gravest order.” Kane’s response illustrates the crucial importance of public reputation in the culture of honor. Whether he had actually been arrested was irrelevant; what mattered was what others believed. Infuriated, Kane scrawled a letter to Johnston that demanded a “full explanation and retraction” as he could not “pass over such an indignity without becoming redress.” His letter contained the code words and ritualized demands that unmistakably signaled the beginning of an affair of honor.¹⁰ As elite southerners, Johnston and Cumming were no strangers to dueling. Though generally opposed to the practice, Johnston had once felt compelled to answer a challenge and was wounded in the ensuing duel. Cumming’s brother had participated in a well-known series of duels in Georgia. Nevertheless,

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FIGURE 9. Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

neither Johnston nor Cumming seemed particularly enthusiastic about Kane’s demands. Cumming apparently did not want to exacerbate the already tense relations between civil and military authorities at Camp Scott. Though he sympathized with Kane, he seems to have declined to act as Kane’s second and refused to deliver the letter. (Each participant in a duel had a second, who served as intermediaries between the combatants and ensured that each man abided by the conventions of the duel.)¹¹

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Kane soon forced the issue with Johnston himself. In a meeting with Fitz-John Porter, whom Kane cast in the role of Johnston’s second, he justified his delay in issuing a challenge, asserting that he had not wished the conflict to interfere with his official duties. The previous day, Kane had delivered Young’s offer of supplies to Johnston. Not amused with Young’s (accurate) description of the army’s lack of supplies, Johnston declared that he would not receive assistance from the rebellious Mormons (though Cumming saw the proposal as a genuine gesture for peace). Having discharged this duty, Kane pursued the matter of personal honor. Johnston clearly did not want a confrontation and explained that he had not issued any order to “constrain” Kane’s movements, but had in fact sought to protect his property and “prevent any inconvenience to him or molestation.” His order, though, had been “incorrectly communicated,” leading to a temporary “surveillance in a slight degree.”¹² Kane accepted Johnston’s explanation, interpreting it as both an apology and a “humiliation” on Johnston’s part, which satisfied the exigencies of personal honor. They had not dueled, he explained to his father and Pat, because “gentlemanly propriety” and “every sense of Christian magnanimity orders me to spare a man whose apology has humbled him as much as this unfortunate’s.” However, if Johnston publicly criticized him, should “his letter writers and newspaper men dare to falsify the facts,” Kane wanted his relatives to use their extensive newspaper connections to denounce Johnston in the national press. He believed that the duel challenge had “strengthened my hands to do good” and gave him the upper hand in his relationship with Johnston, which after that time was outwardly, if icily, cordial. Following the resolution of the Utah War, Kane told Elizabeth that his challenge had contributed to peace, as “the result was Johnson’s [sic] apology, and indirectly, the success of his efforts.”¹³ Kane’s actions would be easily explainable if he were a southern gentleman. Very few northerners, however, were still issuing challenges to duel by this time. His initial actions at Camp Scott probably reflected his penchant for dramatic entrances. In addition, he may have seen the challenge as a negotiating strategy, a way to alienate Cumming from the military leaders. His conduct also demonstrates his affinity for the culture of honor. Elizabeth explained, “Under certain circumstances Tom approves of duelling—as a terror to evil-doers whom the law cannot or will not reach.” While she opposed the practice, Elizabeth described her husband as “of the ‘Church Militant,’ always generous, always unselfish, humble sometimes,” but also “fiery and impetuous.”¹⁴ With his honor secure, Kane turned again to official business, urging Johnston in both a letter and a lengthy meeting on March 16 to reconsider his rejection of the Mormons’ supplies. In Johnston’s view, the only proper overture of peace

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from the Mormons would entail capitulation to federal power, not a cynical ploy to embarrass the army. Johnston lectured Kane that the Mormons held the key to peace and that “Young should consider the calamities he is bringing upon his people.” In response, Kane argued that the “very unhappy” Young desired peace but had to conciliate the Mormon war faction. According to Kane, Johnston’s rebuff of Young’s proposal “would prejudice the object of his [Kane’s] mission, and indicate no desire for peace on our side.” Porter found Kane’s portrayal of a Mormon division persuasive: “His admissions of B. Y.’s weakness and of the existence of two parties was an important one to us.” Kane also hinted at future Mormon tactics; should the army advance, the “Mormons will destroy everything and take to the mountains.” Finally, Kane and Johnston clashed over the treatment of a Mormon courier—Lewis Robison, the Nauvoo Legion’s quartermaster—who had been “fired upon” while waiting outside of Camp Scott for Johnston’s response to Young’s letter.¹⁵ The following day, Kane met with Mormon scouts outside Camp Scott and sent a letter to Young that expounded for the first time the primary narrative he created to persuade the Saints to accept a peaceful solution. While he explained Mormon actions to the federal government by referring to the division of the Saints into a peace party and a war party, he sought to pacify the Saints by emphasizing the animosity between the military officers and the civilian officials, particularly Cumming. He thus blamed the shooting at Robison “solely on the military power unauthorized” and praised Cumming as a “faithful and determined exponent” of Buchanan’s policy, with the “force of character enough to cause his wishes and opinions to be obeyed and respected.” After asking Young to send William Kimball (a militia leader with whom Kane had become acquainted in the Mormon camps in 1846) to meet with him, Kane advised: “Be calm. There is no change. Justice will be done you in due time.”¹⁶ Even though Kane urged calm, the arrival in Salt Lake City on March 19 of his initial report, with little encouraging news, spurred the Mormons to action. Throughout the winter, Young had alluded to abandoning Salt Lake City and the settlements in northern Utah. Eastern press reports speculated on a variety of possible destinations, including Mexico, Central or South America, Vancouver Island, Washington Territory, or Russian Alaska. Envisioning that Nevada’s White Mountains might contain undiscovered valleys capable of holding half a million people, Young primarily looked closer to home. Such a move, he believed, would protect the Saints from the invading army, or at the very least, influence public perceptions on a grand scale. The image of the suffering Saints, again driven from their homes, could possibly turn American sentiment against Buchanan and the army.¹⁷

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The day before the arrival of Kane’s report, a council meeting approved Young’s proposal to abandon Salt Lake City but made no definite plans. Three days later, however, Young proclaimed the “Move South,” instructing all Mormons in northern Utah to leave their homes. Eventually, thirty thousand Saints obeyed, temporarily gathering at Provo. In Nephi, eighty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, one Mormon recorded the explanation he received: “this sudden move is on account of the news from the armey Col T L Kane went out and came back to the boys . . . [H]e told them that the soldiers had had fresh supplies and were determined to come.” As a result, Young decided to “save the effusion of blood” by allowing the army to occupy a deserted Salt Lake City.¹⁸ Kane’s visit with the Mormon scouts outside of Camp Scott not only catalyzed the Move South, but also aroused further suspicions among the army of his loyalties. He had arranged to fire his weapon as a signal of his return to the camp; however, a dark, stormy night created confusion, and the pickets misunderstood Kane’s firing as a precursor to a Mormon attack. As a consequence, the “whole of the garrison of Fort Bridger were aroused and called to arms by an alarm from the sentinels.” Soldiers soon surrounded Kane, who was fired upon at “two paces” but escaped unscathed. Gove scoffed that Kane was the “most astonished man you ever heard of . . . a more frightened individual I never saw.” Though the soldier who shot at Kane claimed he did so accidentally, “we all think he did it on purpose, as Mr. Kane thinks it hit his collar.” Disappointed only that the bullet had not found its target, Gove concluded, “The military authorities think him a spy and there is no doubt about it, and the sooner he gets out of our reach the better.” Porter, who still considered Kane “an ass though a gentleman,” similarly scoffed, “Pity they did not rid him of life—it would have saved one fool from troubling us.” Kane tried to smooth over the uproar by giving the shooter a “present of five dollars” and “money enough to treat the whole guard.”¹⁹ Shaken and discouraged, Kane prepared dispiriting reports to Buchanan. Given the military’s hostility, he could no longer advise the Mormons “to admit this army and its followers indiscriminately within their Valley,” as he doubted the officers “will be able to control their soldiers—much less their disorderly retinue of Camp followers.” Kane also complained bitterly about Johnston’s refusal of Young’s offer of supplies and his insistence that Young must experience “the utmost humiliation of himself and his confederates.” Young would interpret this “grave mistake,” Kane warned, as a “Declaration of War to the knife,” and the Mormon war faction would use it as an “instrument of prejudice” against Young. Kane also complained of the actions of Judge Eckels, a Buchanan appointee of the previous summer. Eckels’s sin was that he had organized some of the ardently anti-Mormon camp followers (“this very vile material”) into a grand jury

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to hear Mormon crimes; Kane knew the Saints would interpret such actions as evidence that the government looked to repeat the persecutions of Illinois and Missouri.²⁰ From his arrival at Camp Scott, Kane had taken for granted the army’s opposition to his efforts, a presumption that his actions toward Johnston had reinforced. Accordingly, he had focused on winning Cumming over to his quest for reconciliation between the Saints and the nation. His description of Young as the head of a Mormon peace party proved particularly crucial, as it transformed Young in the mind of Cumming (and later Buchanan) from an irrational zealot to a moderate, a potential partner in negotiation and the government’s indispensable ally in the pacification of the Mormons. Kane persuaded Cumming to travel to Salt Lake City unaccompanied by the army to claim his governorship and signal his genuine desire for peace. According to his wife, Cumming intended to go to Utah to establish federal supremacy, claim his office, and “order the troops to disband.” Should the Mormons reject any of these provisions, he would then “have recourse to the aid of the military.”²¹ Kane’s relationship with Cumming deepened a rift between Cumming and the military leaders. Though tensions between Cumming and Johnston had begun at Fort Leavenworth in 1857 and festered over the winter, one early observer noted that Kane’s time at Camp Scott “produced an irreconcilable difference of opinion between the civil and the military authority.”²² The imageconscious Cumming saw in Kane’s proposal an opportunity to upstage Johnston and the army and become the leading man in the Utah War drama. His ambition coincided with his political ideology; a southern Democrat, Cumming believed that popular sovereignty should be applied in Utah. Should the Saints submit to federal authority, he pledged to avoid meddling with their domestic relationships and religious practices. (While most southern Democratic leaders supported the Utah Expedition, they also generally opposed anti-polygamy legislation in the 1850s, wary of the precedent it would set for federal intervention in slavery.) In his public narrative of the Utah War, Kane strenuously obscured his own role in Cumming’s decision to enter Utah without the army. Indeed, Kane, Cumming, and Forney all claimed that Cumming had made such a decision with no influence from Kane. Kane’s private writings, however, belie such statements. Among Kane’s scribbles in his diary at Camp Scott are several arguments he used to persuade Cumming to take the journey. Cumming could engage in “peace negotiations,” neutralize the Saints’ anger at Johnston’s refusal of Young’s offer of supplies, and “rally my friends & the peace party generally.” In a private account three months later, Kane stated that Cumming agreed “that I should

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FIGURE 10. Utah governor Alfred Cumming. (Reproduced by permission from the Utah State Historical Society.)

order him in every respect as I thought fit, and that until I brought him back to camp, he would obey me in every respect in all things implicitly.” The timing of Cumming’s decision also suggests Kane’s influence, as Cumming first wrote Secretary of State Lewis Cass of his intended journey on March 24. For public consumption, however, Kane emphasized Cumming’s autonomy, to strengthen his narrative of the deep and preexisting divisions between the peaceful Cumming and the bellicose military leaders. Such a portrayal contributed to the solu-

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tion Kane now envisioned to the Utah War: an alliance between Cumming and Young that would legitimize a truce, ensure tranquility in the coming years, and protect the Mormons from more domineering federal officials.²³ Even with Cumming’s decision to go to Utah, Kane remained skeptical of his eventual success. To Elizabeth on March 24, he wrote, “Disappointment, wifie—except in having saved our troops—which perhaps I ought not to have done, when I think of the heavy odds against the Mormons, and the fierce spirit of this very party longing to assail them.” Nevertheless, he expressed satisfaction with his mission: “I have tested my prowess enough to be sure what is in my blood; and, when I come home to hide my head in our beloved obscurity—it will not be a humble one, except in the sense in which you yourself have prayed for me to bow it.”²⁴ The following day, Kane left Camp Scott to inform William Kimball of Cumming’s decision and make the necessary plans. Accompanied at first by a military escort, he then traveled toward Echo Creek alone. An intense snowstorm limited him (on horseback) to eight miles in as many hours, “so completely benumbed were my animals by the force and coldness of the wind.” At dusk, he finally encountered a Mormon who led him an additional thirty miles to a small camp where Kane “slept in the falling snow that night, and the next, and the next.”²⁵ The conference between Kane and Kimball focused on the Move South and Cumming’s upcoming journey. On Young’s behalf, Kimball asked Kane’s advice on the Saints’ abandonment of northern Utah: “Which is the better, that plan or fighting?” Kane’s response is unrecorded, though he later commented positively on the reemphasis the Move South placed on the image of the suffering Saints. Kane gave Kimball instructions to stymie any opposition from the Mormon war party toward Cumming, again indicating that Kane’s narrative of the division of the Saints into two parties was part his genuine perception of the situation and part his rhetorical construction. Finally, Kane gave the Mormons an escape clause should Young find the plan unacceptable. In such a scenario, Young should send a large group of Mormon soldiers to forcefully, but without violence, compel Cumming and Kane to return to Camp Scott. This final condition demonstrates that Kane and Young had not agreed on a scheme to induce Cumming to go to Utah; rather, Kane acted on his own initiative in conceiving and executing the plan. Writing to Buchanan, Kane put his own contingency plan in Kimball’s mouth, relating that Kimball had predicted that he and Cumming would either reach the “friends of peace” in Salt Lake City or “be met at an early stage of our journey by a repulse of too formidable and peremptory a character

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to make it encumbent upon us to offer any forcible resistance to it.” Though he had orchestrated the possible Mormon responses, Kane already blamed the Mormon war faction for any opposition he and Cumming would encounter. Following their meeting, Kimball rushed to Salt Lake, arriving on March 28, and the news of Kane’s plan halted the urgency of the Move South.²⁶ After Kane’s return to Camp Scott, he and Cumming closely guarded their decision until April 2, when Cumming informed Johnston and asked for necessary supplies and transportation. Explaining his decision, Cumming revealed Kane’s influence: “I have assurances that B. Y. wishes for peace, and that he finds it difficult to rule his people.” Johnston opposed Cumming’s plan unless he had “some invitation or impression made to you that your presence is desired.” In reply, Cumming stated that the Saints expected him and that he had “nothing to fear, unless from some of those wild fanatics, who are opposed to a peace and would be glad to see a collision with the Government—and who are not responsible to the authorities in S. L. C.” Fearing obstruction from extremists at Camp Scott, Cumming asked Johnston to keep his plans confidential.²⁷ By the following day, however, rumors circulated throughout the camp about Cumming’s decision, exasperating Kane and Cumming. Gove dismissed Cumming’s actions as “childishness”: “If Gov. C. has been so far fooled by this nincompoop of a Mr. Col. Kane, he is a bigger fool than I thought him to be.” Forney, one of Cumming’s few partisans, wrote of the “almost universal belief ” that the governor had an advance agreement with Young and “had assurances through Col Kane of a grand reception.” To his patron, Attorney General Black, Forney portrayed Cumming’s decision quite differently, asserting that Cumming started “in opposition to the advice of Col Kane, (who acknowledged that his mission was a failure) and without any assurance from any source by a favourable reception.” Forney thus repeated the narrative Kane had created, emphasizing Cumming’s manly decision to go to Salt Lake alone.²⁸ Fitz-John Porter, privy to Cumming’s private discussion with Johnston, shrewdly dismissed this notion. “Too late Governor to give the impression you are heroic,” he wrote. “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.” Porter now suspected Kane had either fabricated or been duped into believing the existence of a Mormon division: “The Mormons are ordered to differ in opinion from the leaders—to create a sympathy for the latter.” He charged, “Col Kane is a Mormon and is working for the Mormons.” Accusations continued to swirl during the absence of Cumming and Kane throughout April. The gover-

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nor’s wife Elizabeth complained of the “backbiting & defaming” that simultaneously accused Cumming of making a “dishonorable compromise” with Young and of foolishly marching into his own imprisonment in Utah.²⁹ Before leaving, Kane prepared reports to his family and Buchanan that paired the peaceful allies, Young and Cumming, against the warmongering army and dissident Mormons. The army’s belligerence caused Kane to fear Cumming’s “being picked off by the peace haters of the Camp who might think this their shortest cut to interrupt negotiations in progress.” Army officers and civilians at Camp Scott had tried to dissuade Cumming through more peaceful means, telling him he was “rushing on certain death” and calling his plans “madness, simple madness.” Kane linked the language of honor and masculinity to contrast Cumming’s “natural and manly character with that of the bragging, drilling, parading, bugle playing, musket firing crowd of bravos by profession by whom he is surrounded!” Carefully portraying Cumming as sufficiently anti-Mormon, Kane referred to his “bitter prejudices” against the Saints and averred that he would “be hard” on the Mormons but would “set the thing straight.” By contrast, Kane heartily criticized Judge Eckels (“this bloody mouthed judge”) and the military leaders for aggravating relations with the Mormons. He compared the soldiers to “a pack of vicious Coyotas” who had “done their utmost to incense them [the Mormons] by threatening, indicting, indiscriminately eloquently corresponding and equally promiscuously swearing and firing at them.”³⁰ In a letter probably intended for publication, Kane also critiqued the army’s bellicose mood through envisioning the consequences of war. Should the army advance, the Mormons would “employ their force entirely in impeding the march of our soldiers and delaying their advance” until they had completed the Move South and torched Salt Lake City. Even with the Saints in flight, the army would probably precipitate a confrontation. Redeploying his earlier motif of the suffering Saints, Kane predicted a doomsday scenario in which innocent victims—particularly women and children—would bear the brunt of the agony. After fanning the flames, Mormon leaders would either go into hiding “or take shipping for England, the Sandwich Is[lands] or Heaven only knows where.” Younger Mormon men would wage guerilla warfare, though the army would quickly track them down. Kane added a new wrinkle to his motif of the suffering Saints, arguing that persecution would backfire and strengthen Mormonism, as the Saints would use it to reach out to new converts. He envisioned a “Mormon lecturer” appearing “before his British audience ‘in deep black for his murdered wife and family,’ or ‘in the costume which he bore upon the occasion of his memorable escape from the American soldiery at +.’” The more the Mormons suffered, Kane suggested, the stronger Mormonism would become, as the

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Saints would use their persecution to entrench a corporate identity that defined themselves as a people apart from and persecuted by the nation. Thus, the target of the federal campaign, the “real abomination which we ought to wish should perish—the Religion itself,” would thrive.³¹ On April 5, Kane and Cumming, accompanied by two servants, left “this execrated camp,” Kane wrote, “and the men that hate me and my peace.” He exulted to his diary, “Hope Adventure Mountain Air a good Horse & Liberty! . . . What fun! . . . so near happiness!” As he headed for Utah, he looked toward Philadelphia, promising Elizabeth they would be the “happiest couple of lovers in the world” when he returned. “I have never in my youngest days led a purer life than the past three months which I have dedicated to you,” he told her. Perceiving that his role in the conflict was ending, he assured Pat, “It is all over. . . . I have done my work good or bad.” Kane interpreted the “half a hundred providences which seem to have on occasion specially interposed in my behalf ” as the “strongest argument on which I base my more than hope that I shall yet win a peace . . . what other less important purpose has such a stock of miracles been spent for?” The journey had also strengthened his health and he credited “Out door exercise—with excitement enough to blunt the sense of affliction, and Mountain Air.”³² The small party made slow progress the first day, which ended with their “wagon stuck fast” in a snowdrift and Kane suffering from having “been baptised in our attempt to cross the Creek.” Temporarily separated from the servants, Kane and Cumming spent the night outdoors and without food. The following morning, they encountered a group of Mormons that included William Kimball, Porter Rockwell, and Howard Egan, who respectfully treated Cumming as Utah’s governor. After difficult travel in a snowstorm, they found an “excellent dinner” awaiting them that night, as Young had dispatched one of Salt Lake’s finest chefs to greet them. The next night, the escort took Cumming and Kane past the Mormon fortifications in Echo Canyon. To give Cumming an exaggerated sense of Mormon military strength, “the works were brilliantly lighted by Bon-fires & Much parade.” The Mormon guides deliberately traveled slowly, to give the relatively few defenders time to light additional fires and gather for a series of impromptu speeches from Cumming (who never suspected that his audience did not vary). The illumination of Echo Canyon deeply impressed both Kane and Cumming, who said it “outstripped any thing he ever expected to see.”³³ Elaborate receptions awaited them in Salt Lake City, and Cumming soon reported to Johnston that he had been universally well-treated and recognized as governor. Accompanied by Cumming, Kane again took up residence at Staines’s

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mansion. Mormon leaders, who clearly wanted to implement Kane’s advice to forge an alliance with Cumming against the army and hostile federal officials, nevertheless viewed the newcomer with deep skepticism. When Cumming witnessed the continuing Move South, he pleaded “dont move you shall not be hurt I will not be Governor if you dont want me.” Apostle Woodruff thought that the “poor Devil should have thought of this principle before he started from home and not come with an armed force to force himself as governor upon a people who did not want him.”³⁴ Kane and Cumming immediately investigated some of the charges that had precipitated the Utah Expedition, including the Saints’ purported destruction of the territorial law library and the papers of the district court. Finding both intact, Cumming felt confirmed in his conciliatory approach. Unbeknownst to Cumming, Kane privately met with Young soon after his arrival and “told him that he had caught the fish, now you can cook it as you have a mind to.” Playing both sides, Kane saw himself as directing events that would culminate in peace. On April 14, he took Young and George A. Smith to meet with Cumming. Smith thought that Kane “appeared quite healthy” and described Cumming as a “moderate drinker and a hearty eater,” with “more chops than brains.” Similarly unimpressed, Young left the meeting convinced that Cumming “desired the destruction of the Saints.” At least officially, Cumming had a more positive initial view of Young; he reported to Johnston of Young’s “willingness to afford me every facility which I may require for the efficient performance of my administrative duties.”³⁵ For the next several weeks, Kane mediated between Cumming and Young and gathered evidence to rebut allegations made by the former federal officials. Cumming widely proclaimed his willingness to make concessions to the Saints. According to a Mormon who met with Cumming and Kane on April 19, the governor distanced himself from the army and pledged to “make favorable reports to [the] government for us and do all he could to prevent a colission between us and the U.S.” In a cipher letter to his family (probably intended as well for Buchanan), Kane praised Cumming as “right on public matters.” On April 24, Cumming met again with Young in what Kane termed a “final & decisive” conference. “For once I am and know myself to be happy,” Kane recorded. The unofficial truce signaled the Mormons’ willingness to submit to federal authority, allow the army to enter Utah, and end hostilities. In exchange, the Saints secured an ally who promised not to interfere with their religion and to protect them from the federal troops.³⁶ Kane continued to direct Cumming’s actions from behind the scenes after the truce, ghostwriting his official communications to government officials. In

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a May 2 letter to Secretary of State Lewis Cass, which Kane penned and to which Cumming made only minor corrections, Cumming disputed some of the specific allegations that had prompted the Utah Expedition, announced the progress to peace, portrayed Young as a “calming” influence on the Saints, and combated the notion that rank-and-file Mormons were unhappy under Young’s tyranny. Likewise, in a letter to Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives James L. Orr, a prominent South Carolina Democrat, which Kane delivered and may have drafted, Cumming reiterated several of Kane’s themes, including the suffering Saints on the Move South, the division of the Saints into Young’s peace party and an opposing war faction, and the fear that a war would target innocent victims and ultimately strengthen Mormonism. Praising Young as “earnest, intelligent & of great experience,” Cumming wrote that the “chief hope of control over this extraordinary people, is exerted through this man. I believe that I have obtained his confidence and will therefore exercise some ascendancy over his actions.” Finally, Cumming demanded the removal of Judge Eckels for impaneling a grand jury to investigate polygamy in Utah immediately after Cumming’s departure from Camp Scott, which could have doomed the fragile peace and endangered his own life.³⁷ While Kane wrote Cumming’s official letters, he also restricted the flow of information to him, further displaying his strategic manipulation of events. According to Daniel H. Wells, a member of the Mormon First Presidency, Kane thought “all things were progressing as well as he could expect.” However, Kane felt “quite anxious” that Cumming’s letters to Washington should be sent before mail arrived in early May, which could possibly influence Cumming. Should mail be received prematurely, Kane suggested the Mormons “have it detained at Provo” for a few days. He also persuaded Cumming to have his communications taken to Johnston by Mormon messengers, which would “tend to add fuel to the fire” between Johnston and Cumming. Kane perceived that his efforts had solidified Cumming’s alliance with the Saints. Later that month, he commented to a Mormon that Cumming “appears to be our warm friend and has pledged himself in writing to sustain the Saints and will call them out to oppose Johnson [sic] and says . . . bro Brigham and he can whip all the troops.”³⁸ Kane and Cumming also visited Provo, hoping to persuade the Saints to reverse the Move South. Kane portrayed Young to his family and Buchanan as tempering the more extreme Mormons (even though, in reality, Young had forcefully exhorted his sometimes recalcitrant followers to continue the Move South). Both Kane and Cumming repeatedly urged the end of the Move South, but given the deep animosity toward the military, the Saints abandoned the policy only after the army passed through Salt Lake City on June 26. Privately,

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Kane perceived that Young was reluctant to shift his course again: “The effect of his changing his position for the third time would have been to discredit entirely his extraordinary pretentions as one receiving revelations from the Most High.”³⁹ On May 5, Young “tenderly” broke the news of John Kane’s death to Thomas, prompting his decision to return to Philadelphia. Three days later, Young invited Kane to investigate Mormonism’s spiritual claims. Since 1846, they had engaged in a “friendly and free interchange of views.” Sensing Kane’s “guarded reserve” on “matters of religious belief,” however, Young had carefully avoided the subject. Correctly deducing that Kane was “more or less inclined to skepticism” on religious matters, Young argued that Mormonism “is so naturally philosophical, and so consistent with and enforcive of every valuable and true principle” that it would “interest a person [of ] your reflective turn of mind.” Kane rejected Young’s overtures; for him, Mormonism would always remain in the realm of reform, not personal belief.⁴⁰ Kane left Salt Lake City with Cumming and an escort of Mormons on May 13. Wells recorded that Kane “seemed considerably affected in taking leave of the City, constantly looking back as we rode along the bench, and admiring it, but said he should never see it again.” The group first traveled to Camp Scott, where Kane and Cumming learned of Buchanan’s appointment of official peace commissioners. On April 6, Buchanan, hopeful that Kane had successfully encouraged Mormon leaders to back down, had issued a presidential proclamation. If the Saints submitted to federal authority, Buchanan promised a blanket pardon and noninterference with their religion. This news, along with the arrival of Kane and his Mormon entourage, incensed the soldiers at Camp Scott. A Mormon who passed nearby later that month wrote: “I understand that hell is at Fort Bridger. . . . The soldiers were as mad as devils when Colonel Kane and his escort passed through their midst; and they have made two attempts to kill the colonel, but have failed.” Leaving Cumming in this inhospitable environment, Kane and the Mormons traveled across the plains.⁴¹ A few weeks later, Buchanan’s peace commissioners—Lazarus W. Powell, a senator-elect and former governor of Kentucky, and Ben McCulloch, who had won fame as a soldier in the Texas Revolution, in skirmishes against Indians, and in the Mexican-American War—arrived at Camp Scott, where they counseled with Johnston and Cumming. The commissioners reported to Secretary of War Floyd that the Saints had duped their new governor about their pacific intentions. They then traveled to Utah, where they presented Buchanan’s conditions to Mormon leaders. Eager both to make peace and to save face, Young agreed to allow the army into Utah but insisted that it not be stationed in Salt Lake

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City. On June 26, Johnston marched his army through the abandoned streets of Salt Lake City and, about forty miles southwest of the city, they built Camp Floyd. Shortly afterward, Young declared an end to the Move South. The Utah War ended in an uneasy truce, and both Buchanan and Young claimed victory. To Kane, Young wrote, “The Administration yielded, and we feel also to yield a little, and bear much so long as we are satisfied that no real evil is intended.”⁴² The Latter-day Saints had little doubt of Kane’s divinely appointed role in ending the Utah War. Eleanor McComb Pratt, widow of the slain Apostle Parley P. Pratt, wrote that Kane was “inspired by God to stand in the defence of oppressed innocence, and inasmuch as you continue to act obedient to this inspiration I know the God of Israel will bless you and millions will rise up and call you blessed.” William W. Phelps and Eliza R. Snow, Zion’s poets laureate, both composed tributes to Kane. In his, Phelps honored “The tongue that forever speaks truth.” Snow’s piece, though not the most elegant poetry, illustrates well the Saints’ view of Kane: You plead the rights of man—you fain would see All men enjoy the sweets of liberty. Goodness is greatness—knowledge pow’r; and thou Perchance art greatest of your nation, now. And while that nation sink, beneath its blight; You, like a constellation, cheer the night.

Some Saints believed that Kane’s conversion must be imminent. Josephine Richards, a recent handcart pioneer, told him, “the Spirit testifies to me that you will be one with us . . . and you will be great in the Kingdom of our God.”⁴³ The Mormon leadership also extolled Kane. Apostle George A. Smith credited him for saving the army, “this mass of sinful mortals from festering along the mountain sides,” and allowing its entrance into Utah, “with all the paraphernalia of modern Christianity, civilization and order, the stream of corruption, its accumulated icebergs of degradation and filth.” While Smith perhaps considered this a dubious honor, he also noted that the Saints were “indebted [to Kane] for their existence at the present time.” In short, God “made you an instrument to prevent the shedding of blood.” Young reinforced Kane’s sense of heroic iconoclasm, praising him for waging “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 as you have ever been.” In 1864, the Saints named a county in southern Utah after Kane as a gesture of their esteem. While Mormon thankfulness could cynically be viewed as the flattery necessary to stroke the ego of a valued

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ally, their private statements also reflect their estimation of his actions. To Woodruff, Young confided that Kane’s intervention was the “reason why we have let the army alone.”⁴⁴ By contrast, the national press engaged in a lengthy debate over Kane’s motivations for traveling to Utah and his influence in the peace settlement. Throughout his absence, Elizabeth fretted over the speculative, incomplete, and often inaccurate reports that trickled east about his activities. The Kane family jealously guarded Thomas’s reputation. Pat was “very furious” about Buchanan’s appointment of peace commissioners, believing it would “take all the wind out of Tom’s sails.” Though initially hopeful this “may influence his return,” Elizabeth soon agreed, seeing it as “singular behaviour on Mr Buchanan’s part” that “seems to place Tom in a very unpleasant position.” She hoped that Thomas “will have succeeded in making peace before the Commissioners get out there” but envisioned a “frightful possibility”: “Suppose poor Young & H C Kimball give themselves up on the faith of Tom’s word, and then Buchanan refuses to sustain him?” To combat Buchanan’s actions and unfavorable press reports, the Kanes followed Thomas’s pattern of anonymously placing favorable articles and “Letters from California” in newspapers. One article, purportedly written in Los Angeles in late April, conjectured that Kane had undertaken “an errand of mercy, hoping he might bring about a reconciliation, and avert bloodshed.”⁴⁵ When news of Cumming’s triumphant entrance into Salt Lake City arrived east, Kane became an instant celebrity. On May 17, the St. Louis Republican trumpeted, “End of the Mormon Rebellion!” The paper credited Kane with causing the “change in Brigham Young’s programme—from that of open rebellion, to a direct invitation to Gov. Cumming to visit Salt Lake City, and take charge of the Government.” The paper asked for an inquiring public, “Who is Col. Kane?” Even in his own moment of glory, the long shadow of his deceased father and brother still partially obscured Thomas; the Republican called him, then thirty-six years old, a “young man,” the son of Judge Kane and the brother of Doctor Kane. Denying that Kane was a Mormon, the paper reported that he had been sent to Utah by Buchanan and had used his influence to secure peace. The following day in Philadelphia, Elizabeth happily recorded, “Today, the newspapers and the town are ringing with his praises,” and some even dubbed Kane “the Napoleon of Peace.” Greeley’s New York Tribune lauded him: “He has avoided the effusion of blood; he has saved the expenditure of millions; he has substituted peace for a war in which glory was impossible. A private citizen, he has done what all the power of the Government could not accomplish. Honor to the patriot and the peacemaker!”⁴⁶ Other press reports asserted that Kane’s secret Mormonism, not humanitarian

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motivations, had prompted his actions. To dispel such rumors, Pat met with Buchanan in mid-May, who “with his own hand wrote a notice to the [Washington] Union, saying that Tom was no Mormon, but a worthy brother of Elisha’s.” Buchanan still distanced himself from Kane—so that Kane could receive all the credit, he disingenuously explained—though he also told Pat that the peace commissioners “were no more Commissioners than Tom himself.” A correspondent of the New York Times doubted the Union’s denial, reporting that Kane had previously “proselytized for Mormonism.” Even if Kane was not Mormon, the Times correctly reasoned, he “may be acting as much in behalf of Brigham Young as of the Government.”⁴⁷ Most accounts dismissed reports of Kane’s covert Mormonism, but many nevertheless sniffed a conspiracy between Kane and Buchanan to manipulate the country into a dishonorable peace. The New York Times’ correspondent at Camp Scott speculated that Buchanan had colluded with Kane, a “sympathizer with the Mormon faith, and therefore necessarily a disciple and servant of its High Priest.” In this telling, Buchanan sent Kane as an “emissary to Brother Brigham” to trade an amnesty for the Mormons’ “sham obedience” and “let the federal Administration get its fingers out of the fire.” Like the Times’ correspondent, many Americans viewed the prospect of a nonpunitive peace with displeasure. One Georgian railed to Buchanan, “I think Brigham’s blood would save the blood of probably thousands—and millions of money!” Instead, Young, a “mean, disgusting scamp,” had escaped punishment even though he had “set at defiance the whole government, burn[ed] supplies, murder[ed] men, involve[d] the country in untold expenses, and the Army in unappreciable hardships.” The New York Herald meanwhile criticized Kane for simple irrelevance, as “army movements,” not his actions, had impelled the Mormons to seek peace.⁴⁸ For his part, Kane sought to deflect attention away from himself and toward Cumming. During his return trip, he spoke often with reporters, leaving a trail of newspaper articles quickly dispersed around the country that credited Cumming for pacifying the troublesome Mormons. At Fort Laramie, for instance, Kane told a reporter that he had never witnessed “an infuriated mob in a city more desperate or wild in their denunciation of the United States,” but Cumming’s “cool, determined manner kept them at bay till reason got the better of their judgment, and they quieted down like a swarm of bees.”⁴⁹ Amid the continuing press speculation, Kane arrived in Philadelphia on June 19. Ecstatic, Elizabeth thought he “looked far better in health than when he left.” He stayed only two days before leaving to consult with Buchanan at Washington. During his brief visit, though, he shared unwelcome news with Elizabeth. The “first moment we were alone,” Elizabeth recorded, her husband told

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her, “like my dear honest darling, that the hope that had dawned on him of being a Christian was gone.” Elizabeth believed it was “only a cloud veiling the sun” and professed assurance he would return to Christianity. Nevertheless, she wrote, “how hard it will be to shut up in my own breast again all the sympathies that went out to my brother-Christian. He was so much nearer me!” The exact reasons for Kane’s disaffection are as obscure as those for his conversion the previous fall. Had the “Holy War,” as he referred to the nation’s actions during the Utah War, fought by American Christians against his Mormon friends crushed his fledgling faith? Had his associations with the Saints soured him on Christian orthodoxy? Elizabeth may have thought so. A few weeks later, she noted the “seemingly miraculous power that Tom says these Mormons have. He has seen instances, scores of them, of invalids restored to health and working capacity by the word of the Mormon priest.” Jealous of their claims on Thomas’s time and suspicious of their influence on his spiritual health, Elizabeth clearly resented the Mormons at times.⁵⁰ Thomas also distressed Elizabeth by reiterating his unwillingness to accept government reimbursement for his traveling expenses. Meticulously recording their financial standing in her journal, Elizabeth noted credits of $18,150 (mostly tied up in insurance policies and McKean County land) versus debts of $9,184, including $2,600 Kane had taken to Utah and an additional $1,200 Elizabeth used during his absence. Pat concurred with Thomas’s decision, reasoning, “Tom’s achievement is worth more than $2600 to the family.” Elizabeth countered that Thomas had “no prospect of employment (lucrative employment, his family will give him work enough),” two children, and “a useless woman like me to be a drag on him.” She wrote, “Still, he wills it, and notwithstanding his theory of partnership, equal rights, and so forth, practically the only result of my disapproval is to depress his spirits, and make him firmer in the belief which I know he entertains that my honour is not as delicate as his, and that my mercantile associations make me covetous.” While she respected his “noble delicacy and disinterestedness,” she feared that if he died or could not find work, “we must be a burden on Mother’s estate,” a prospect that “galls me.” Elizabeth vacillated between lamenting her own dependence—“To be a burden on him in everything degrades me in my own eyes”—and expressing relief “that I am no longer my own mistress but can refer everything to ‘the Colonel.’”⁵¹ While Elizabeth agonized, Kane consulted with Buchanan and his cabinet during five days in Washington in late June. In his first private meeting with the president, Kane assured him that the Utah peace “is all true . . . and better than he had yet heard”; in response, Buchanan “thanked God with some solemnity.” The Move South had evoked Buchanan’s concern, and he inquired, “But these

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poor creatures—is there much suffering among them?” Kane dispelled his apprehensions about the Saints’ immediate necessities to his satisfaction. Buchanan and his cabinet disagreed with Kane about the “course to be pursued respecting Utah,” and Kane “quarrelled” with Secretary of War John Floyd. Kane considered their disputes “honest and open differences of opinion,” which did not cause him to think “less highly of the President & Cabinet . . . seeing that the truth had been kept from them by designing persons, and they no doubt heard it from him [Kane] for the first time.” At length, however, Kane persuaded Buchanan to accept his narrative of the war, and he “received Buchanan’s promise as a gentleman, that the Mormons should no longer be molested.” Even though he largely accepted Kane’s views of the war’s outcome, Buchanan kept Kane at arm’s length publicly. After Kane’s visit to Washington, Buchanan’s allies at the Washington Union asserted that Kane went to Utah not at the president’s behest, but “on an individual, self-imposed mission, as a private citizen, philanthropist, well-wisher of the Mormons, or what you will.”⁵² The cabinet discussions in part focused on the prospect of replacing some of the current Utah officials. John Bernhisel reported to Young that the Saints’ “enemies” desired Cumming’s removal, but Kane’s strong support had ensured his retention. Furthermore, Bernhisel related that changes in other appointments (a likely reference to Judge Eckels) “are also confidently anticipated.” A week later, though, Bernhisel stated that Eckels would not be removed, but “he holds his office by an uncertain tenure, and he will be instructed fully in regard to his future course.” Though the efforts against Eckels ultimately fizzled, Kane succeeded in lobbying for the appointment of a district attorney sympathetic to the Mormons to counteract Eckels. In July, Attorney General Black selected Pennsylvanian Alexander Wilson, whom Kane believed “quite above the grade of man who generally consents to accept a Dist. Attyship for the Territories.” Wilson proved to be a favorable appointment for the Mormons, as he supported Cumming’s conciliatory policies (though alcoholism and indebtedness limited his effectiveness). Kane and Mormon leaders also expressed satisfaction with Cumming’s continued friendliness. Young explained, “He likes exceedingly to have things his own way, but so long as his way lies generally in the right channel we can overlook some erratic flights of assumed authority.” Following Kane’s meetings with Buchanan’s cabinet, both Bernhisel and Kane sensed that the political winds had temporarily shifted in the Saints’ favor. Bernhisel noted, “Unless the imprudence and want of self control of our people furnish them with a fresh set of excuses, they will never be able [to] send another army to Utah, or pay for sustaining an army another winter there.”⁵³ Free from the immediate crisis, Kane descended into illness and depression.

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After his return from Washington, Elizabeth worried, “He is sick already and is also suffering much from one eye, which was injured in crossing the snows.” A few days later, Kane awoke with a “violent fever” and he soon became “thoroughly worn out & dispirited”; the Kanes traveled to a resort in the Hudson Valley to help him recover. Depression, related to the deaths of Elisha and John Kane, reinforced his poor health. In late August, he was “slowly emerging from the depths of [his] grief.” (His depression, however, continued into 1859, when he described himself as “despondent and listless; and, if he has ceased weeping for his noble father and dear brother—is all too conscious that the light of his day has left the world.”) In mid-July, the Kanes received another disappointment as Judge John Cadwalader appointed another man to Kane’s former clerkship. Elizabeth told her husband “we must go West,” as they could not “earn enough to enable us to spend our winters here, our summers in a healthier climate. Better therefore to remain permanently in the healthy mountains.” She thus encouraged Thomas to seek an appointment as land agent of the McKean and Elk Land Company, a course he successfully pursued.⁵⁴ Even during his sickness, Kane worked to persuade the Buchanan administration and the press to accept his narrative of the Utah War. Bernhisel traveled to Philadelphia and New York to assist Kane “in arranging matters with the press.” Kane’s hypersensitivity to perceived slights to his honor (probably exacerbated by his illness) soon soured his relationship with Buchanan’s cabinet. Kane asked Attorney General Black to review a letter he had written to Young, giving the Mormons promises about future government intentions. Black’s refusal to commit before consulting with Buchanan offended Kane’s honor, though Black tried to assure him that his “voluntary and patriotic service, are highly valued” and informed him that Buchanan wished to make statements to Young only through official channels. Nevertheless, Kane demanded the letter’s return and threatened to cease all communication with Black, though he soon reversed course. While he privately considered Buchanan’s “certainly the most corrupt administration he has ever had to deal with,” Kane resolved to continue “an avowed supporter.”⁵⁵ Though he lacked inside news from the administration, Kane sent Young advice in mid-July. Believing the tide had shifted, he urged Young to support Cumming, prepare another bid for Utah statehood, and ask for a “general Investigation” by the government to disprove the charges that led to the Utah War. Kane marveled at the rapid shift in public opinion on the nation’s “Holy War” against the Saints. The previous year, the “unanimity with which our people were prepared to carry on the Mormon War was frightful . . . like the frantic crowd rushing for a narrow passage, driving the foremost before it, and declar-

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ing itself innocent of the trampling done by them.” Now, however, the primary debate concerned “who shall have the credit . . . of the pacification of Utah”— Johnston, Cumming and Kane, or Buchanan’s peace commissioners. While a successful statehood campaign would require an even greater change in public opinion, Kane promised, “Time will do the work,” and he pledged to “give you months of my time between this and Christmas to lay the guns, and order on the assault.” To ensure the effectiveness of his efforts, he counseled the Saints to “be quiet and orderly and well disposed,” so that the new federal officials would contradict the “slanders” against the Saints and media attention would focus on the “camp lies,” the fraud of the “contractors and speculators,” and the cost of the war.⁵⁶ Though Kane perceived that the pendulum of public opinion had begun to swing toward more sympathetic portrayals of the Saints, Mormon leaders continued to feel under attack. In a letter to Kane, George A. Smith characterized the “reports of Newspaper Correspondents from this place” as “a tissue of falsehoods.” That fall, a non-Mormon from St. Louis, Kirk Anderson, began an antiMormon newspaper, the Valley Tan, in Utah. Though Young considered it a “vulgar little scurrilous sheet,” he feared its influence on the national mood. The newly installed federal judicial machinery in Utah, headed by Eckels, also targeted church leaders with “vexatious schemes and cases against [Young] and others, in order to annoy and stir up strife and contention.” In addition, the Saints constantly protested the “corrupting influence” of the army and their “camp followers.” Young charged, “We live under the menaces of a living Military despotism.” He pleaded with Kane to focus his lobbying and public relations efforts on obtaining the troops’ removal.⁵⁷ To assist Kane, Young assigned newspaper editor and soon-to-be apostle George Q. Cannon to “act entirely” under Kane’s direction in the East. A thirtyone-year-old English immigrant, Cannon possessed a gentlemanly demeanor and a quick intelligence; his apologetic and writing skills had been honed through four years as a missionary in Hawaii and stints as editor of two Mormon newspapers. Young hoped Cannon and Kane would develop “a mutual friendship” that would “aid in ridding our fair Territory of her foreign dictators.” Cannon, who probably influenced Mormonism more than anyone else except Young in the second half of the nineteenth century, quickly impressed Kane and (again, with the exception of Young) became his closest Mormon associate. Two years later, Kane extolled Cannon to Young as “singularly well fitted for the conduct of public business”: “With G. Q. Cannon at Washington, your affairs will never suffer there.”⁵⁸ Kane concocted a plan for Cannon to cultivate relationships with newspaper

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editors. Cannon should not yet assume the ecclesiastical post of the “presidency of the Eastern mission.” Rather, he should pose as “a man of business, a ‘Mormon’ of course, with some means at command” to devote to changing public opinion. Kane instructed Cannon to meet with leading newspaper editors in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., who possessed the “rare gift of knowing the public mind—knowing what will meet with popular favor and when and how to manufacture public opinion on any question.” Cannon should offer the editors “well written articles as correspondence and editorial” revealing “several unwritten chapters of the history of our troubles.” Following Cannon’s efforts, Kane also visited the editors to “learn their true position and feelings and shape things accordingly.” Implementing their plan, Cannon and Kane placed anonymous articles and persuaded several of the editors to support a proposed congressional bill to make Utah territorial positions elected rather than appointed, which would have given Mormons control of local government. In return, the editors received articles, flattery, and possibly bribes.⁵⁹ As he had in 1846, Kane recognized the relationship between public opinion and congressional legislation. Acting upon Kane’s recommendation, the Mormons prepared another application for statehood by dusting off an 1856 memorial that, upon the advice of Senator Stephen A. Douglas, had never been presented to a then-hostile Congress. In October, Young instructed Bernhisel to push the bid in the upcoming session when Kane “deemed proper.” In December, though, Bernhisel reported that the prospects appeared “very gloomy,” and Kane advised that statehood would be achieved only after a “decided change in public sentiment in our behalf,” which would “require some time to accomplish.” A few months later, Kane had completely reversed his earlier suggestion; he now believed that a statehood application would only display the Saints’ “weakness,” as “falsehoods of the most atrocious character against us as a people” continued to circulate. The Mormon troubles weighed heavily on Kane during the winter of 1858–59 and even jeopardized his health, as he “overtaxed himself on several occasions” while trying to “counteract and mar the plots” of the Saints’ opponents.⁶⁰ Cumming’s possible removal as governor loomed as the greatest threat to Kane’s vision of the proper resolution to the Utah War. While Kane and Young had their own doubts about Cumming—his alcoholism made him “his own worst enemy”—they recognized his key role in protecting the Saints and feared any possible replacement. During August 1858, Kane told Young of his plans to bolster Cumming’s public reputation in a “narrative which I shall present next winter.” To satisfy Cumming’s considerable vanity, solidify his alliance with the Saints, and strengthen his credibility with Buchanan, Kane would present Cum-

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ming (not the commissioners) as the key peacemaker. To do so would require him to omit Young’s own “chief role,” but Kane promised Young to “leave on file among my papers a Statement that will do you Justice.” Buchanan’s search for a possible replacement for Cumming during the winter of 1858–59 prompted Kane to deliver his lecture defending the governor before the New York Historical Society in March 1859. As before his lecture on the Mormons in 1850, Kane’s health presented problems. In late February, Elizabeth “annoyed” Kane by pressing him to give up the lecture. “He is anxious to ‘put it through’ a phrase which curses his life,” she fretted. “He is perpetually putting weights on his safety valve in order to press on under higher working power than he ought to do.” While Kane worried that it would not be a “creditable literary production” he hoped it would “help to keep Cumming Governor of Utah.”⁶¹ As Kane mounted the lectern, he faced a large and “very intelligent” crowd. To bolster his own credibility, he publicly distanced himself from the Saints; he hoped the lecture would “put an end to the connection of his name with the affairs of Utah, which had become a source of absolute annoyance to him.” He disappointed at least some in the audience by not delivering a “racy recital of adventures and experiences among the polygamous community and its leading spirits.” Rather, Kane presented a “eulogium of Gov. Cumming” and his courageous decision to travel to Salt Lake City unaccompanied by the army and without assurances of his reception. Complaining that “no man has been more vilified and had less justice accorded to him,” he lauded Cumming’s “gallant” conduct in securing peace. Though “feeble in body” and in pain, Kane “got through with it very well,” in Cannon’s estimation.⁶² Kane’s lecture accomplished its aim of helping Cumming remain Utah’s governor. According to Cannon, Buchanan anxiously inquired about the lecture, and he “felt much relieved” that Kane had not contradicted the president’s own public statements (though he had shifted the emphasis on Utah’s pacification from the peace commissioners to Cumming). Kane pronounced himself “very well satisfied with the result.” Cannon agreed, calling the lecture “most opportune—it was a blow, and a telling one, too, in the right spot,” which gave Kane “reason to think Governor Cumming safe for the present, and this is a great relief to him.” Impressed with Kane’s dedication, Cannon wrote that there “probably was not one Elder in the Church out of a thousand who would have taken such risks or deemed it necessary to have gone to such pains . . . to accomplish such an end.” Unlike in 1850, Kane did not publish this lecture, a reflection of his exhaustion, financial difficulties, and desire to keep out of the public spotlight. To influence public policy, Kane also cultivated a personal relationship with Buchanan. According to Cannon, Buchanan now saw himself as the Mor-

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mons’ “best friend,” a feeling Kane encouraged, believing Buchanan “would feel a sense of pride in being thought our [the Mormons’] protector.” For the most part, Kane saw Buchanan’s actions toward the Saints after the Utah Expedition as “better almost than he could have expected.”⁶³ While he extolled Cumming, Kane repeatedly refused publicity about his own role during the conflict. In July 1858, a group of prominent Philadelphians petitioned Kane to compose a “full, clear and minute narrative” of his “very important service to our Country and humanity.” He declined, citing a wish for obscurity and a desire to not unsettle the fragile peace (though admitting he would like to “expose a few eminent humbugs and salt some of the leeches who drop off so slowly from their hold upon the Treasury”). Eli Price, a Quaker reformer and family friend, urged Kane to reconsider, calling his actions “the most brilliant episode in American history. I say this because the individual of his own high impulses, in so short a time, with great risks, has achieved so great a good, by averting a tremendous evil.” Notwithstanding such encouragement, Kane consistently declined to comment on or write about his experiences. When a newspaper closely tied to the Buchanan administration announced that Kane would present his “case to the people,” he fumed to Buchanan that this “caps the climax of gratuitous misrepresentation.” Insisting again that such a course would be “highly prejudicial to the public interest,” he renewed his “determination with regard to the newspapers and newspaper people.” Kane only wanted to “run away and hide myself among the mountains of Elk County.”⁶⁴ Elizabeth offered several explanations for Kane’s distaste of self-promotion. First, he believed that receiving the “‘glory of men’ would sully the offering he had made to God.” Though he had again renounced Christian orthodoxy, he yet “felt very humbly and yet very proudly that God had accepted him as an instrument.” In addition, Kane believed that continued peace depended on his silence: “Every word he utters, good, bad or indifferent would be caught up in Utah and used to influence the public mind there.” His silence ensured that the Mormons would “wait and keep on the lookout for something from him for a good while”; in the meantime, they would “be settling down, quieting their own apprehensions, and making the best of things.” A truthful narrative would require Kane to expose “what rascally treatment the Mormons have met with of late, and what excuse they had for rebelling,” as well as the potential “mischief ” the Saints could yet cause. Such sentiments would “encourage the War party in Utah and proportionately depress the friends of Peace.” Finally, Elizabeth believed that Kane’s patriotism compelled him not to reveal “so much that was discreditable to our own United States officials.” Kane was certainly not compelled by humility. Indeed, he credited himself and Young with saving the nation from

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war. He privately wrote, “next to myself—this is modest—our country owes more to Brigham Young than to any other human being in our generation.”⁶⁵ Concerned for her husband’s reputation, Elizabeth dissented from his decision to avoid publicity. Even while claiming she eschewed ambition—“certainly I would not care to have Tom a Major, General, Ambassador, Prince or President”—she wanted Buchanan to recognize him during his annual message in December 1858. She suspected Buchanan would not do it, however, given the precedent of a June presidential message that included “no word of Tom, though in a special message on Utah affairs a word of praise would have been, to say the least, graceful.” Buchanan’s only gesture to reward Kane—offering to appoint him to a foreign mission—had thoroughly annoyed Elizabeth. Since Kane’s well-known antislavery views would likely prevent confirmation, she charged Buchanan with insincerity and ingratitude. In his December message, Buchanan surprised Elizabeth by mentioning 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.” However, Buchanan highlighted the role of the army and the official peace commissioners rather than Kane’s contribution. While she expressed some small pleasure at Buchanan’s statement—“they say the Kanes are the only family in the country two of whose members have been mentioned in presidential messages”—Elizabeth charged the president with giving “a perverted statement of facts.” She fumed, “He actually praises the drunken and brutal wretches who he knows gave Tom next to as much trouble as the Mormons.”⁶⁶ Elizabeth contrasted Buchanan’s stingy praise with the Mormons’ actions. Besides an outpouring of tributes, the Saints repeatedly (if surreptitiously) tried to reimburse Kane for his expenses. When Daniel Wells parted from Kane after accompanying him on the first stretch of his journey home, he “dropped something heavy in my lap and rode off not stopping for all my shouts.” Kane found a “chronometer watch worth at least $500,” which he gave to Elizabeth Cumming to return. In addition, Kane spent twelve hundred dollars in bank drafts while in Utah, which had never been cashed. Suspicious, he pressed Bernhisel for an explanation. Reluctantly, Bernhisel gave Kane a letter Young had written for such an occasion, in which Young pleaded with Kane to accept the “just though exceedingly poor remuneration for many very great favors.” Kane, however, insisted on repaying the money.⁶⁷ Though he shied away from publicity for himself, Kane continued to burnish the Mormon public image, in part through lobbying the Buchanan administration to contain the most explosive issue connected to the Utah War: the Moun-

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tain Meadows Massacre. During his journey to Utah, Kane had experienced the consequences of the massacre in the rage of the San Bernardino Vigilance Committee and in the disquietude of the southern Utah settlements. Although his route northward bypassed Mountain Meadows, Kane met with Kanosh, a Pahvant Ute Indian chief who had converted to Mormonism, who confirmed what other Mormons had undoubtedly told Kane. According to Kanosh, the Fancher emigrant party, traveling from Arkansas to California, had stirred up continual troubles in their journey through Utah. Kanosh charged that the emigrants had “killed a beef for them [the Indians] but must have poisoned it,” as “four men and a number of women & children” died. “Then they got so mad: they passed the word round & gathered all together and used them up,” he concluded. Kanosh even provided Kane with the names of several of the Native Americans purportedly responsible. Thus, Kane heard a narrative that freed Mormons of any complicity in the crime.⁶⁸ Just as he had easily believed Mormons’ denials of polygamy until 1852, Kane accepted their explanation, buttressed by Kanosh’s testimony, of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The grisly details doubtless seemed too atrocious to attribute to some of those whose cause he had long championed. His trust in the Mormons and his emotional dependence on his relationship with them conditioned him to look past the hard truths of the involvement of some Mormons, which most of the nation suspected. Nevertheless, Kane was not alone in initially accepting that the massacre was a Native American atrocity; even Mormon leaders, including Young, at first believed the reports of the massacre perpetrators that shifted the blame to local Indians.⁶⁹ By 1859, however, Young recognized the guilt of some Mormons in southern Utah (though still not fully understanding the numbers involved) and offered federal judicial authorities assistance to bring them to trial “to be condemned or acquitted as an impartial, unprejudiced judge and jury should decide.” Territorial justices John Cradlebaugh and Eckels, deeply suspicious of Young, rejected these offers. That spring, Cradlebaugh convened court in Provo to investigate the massacre and, claiming Mormon intimidation and obstruction, temporarily jailed community officials and ordered federal troops to protect the proceedings. These tactics infuriated both local Mormons (who feared the combination of judicial and military persecution) and more moderate territorial officials, including Governor Cumming, Alexander Wilson, and Jacob Forney (who favored conciliation over confrontation and believed that only the governor could call forth the army). On Young’s urging, Kane successfully pressured Buchanan and Attorney General Black in June to restrict the power to request assistance to the governor from federal troops. Black rebuked Cradlebaugh and clarified that

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only Cumming possessed such power. After meeting with the president, Kane reported to Young that Buchanan “went out of his way to speak in terms of severe condemnation of the course of the Cradlebaugh ayacuchos” and praised the Saints’ “attachment to law & order.”⁷⁰ While agreeing with Young and Kane on the immediate issue of the legality of Cradlebaugh’s actions, both Buchanan and Black pressed Kane for more information on Mountain Meadows. In November 1859, Black asked Kane to read Cradlebaugh’s report, which asserted a connection between the Saints and the massacre. Again putting on the persona of the impartial outsider, Kane remarked to Black of his wish “to put an end to this mixing up my name with Mormon concern.” Nevertheless, Kane repeated the initial Mormon portrayal of the massacre as solely the responsibility of Native Americans, citing his conversation with Kanosh and his own observations of the “wicked and degraded” Indians of southern Utah. Speaking to Black as a fellow Democratic insider, not as a Mormon advocate, Kane urged him to support the removal of troops from Utah. “The Mormons certainly cannot complain” of the soldiers’ presence, as they were “fattening on the camp slops so famously,” but both the Democratic Party and the soldiers would benefit from the army’s removal.⁷¹ Kane explained to Young that Black was “anxious for a full account” of the massacre. Perceiving that “he wishes it for good purposes,” he advised Young’s compliance, in the form of a confidential letter to himself that he would then show to Black. Following Kane’s instructions, Young sent a letter that complained of the attempts, by both the press and government officials like Cradlebaugh, to link the Saints to the massacre. Young denied personal involvement: “The horrifying event transpired without my knowledge, except from after report, and the recurring thought of it ever causes a shudder in my feelings.” He awaited an official investigation, as the “facts of the massacre of men, women, and children are so shocking and crucifying to my feelings, that I have not suffered myself to hear anymore about them than the circumstances of conversation compelled.” Besides avowing that he had not ordered the massacre, Young changed the subject to Cradlebaugh’s infringements on Mormon civil rights. In his view, federal judicial officials, their “bayonet courts,” and the confusing jurisdictions of the judicial system in Utah—not Mormon obstruction—explained the lack of adequate investigation and prosecution.⁷² Young’s explanations and Kane’s assurances convinced Black. Further attempts by Cradlebaugh and Eckels to bring indictments against the perpetrators proved futile, in part because of their insistence on holding court in central Utah, rather than in the vicinity of the massacre in southern Utah. The oncoming Civil War distracted the nation from the furor over Mountain Meadows.

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Church investigations continued over the next decade, and Young ordered ecclesiastical disciplinary punishment against some of the key participants. Not until the 1870s would additional government inquiries occur, eventually resulting in the execution of John D. Lee, the Mormon scapegoat for the massacre.⁷³ Kane’s final service to the Saints in the years immediately after the Utah War foreshadowed his primary efforts for them in the 1870s: battling federal antipolygamy legislation. Southerners, concerned with creating a precedent for federal intervention with slavery, had killed three attempts to outlaw Utah polygamy in the 1850s. In 1860, however, anti-polygamy legislation passed the House of Representatives. To prevent passage in the Senate, Kane wrote a lengthy letter to Virginia Democratic senator James Mason (a copy of which he also sent to Buchanan) that detailed arguments against the legislation, probably to give Mason firepower to help defeat the bill. Opposition to laws banning polygamy made strange bedfellows out of the antislavery Kane and Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law. In his letter, Kane again emphasized that persecution would only help Mormonism as it would “play into the hands of the ultrapolygamist and war party in Utah” and potentially lead to an armed conflict with the federal government. The Saints, Kane predicted, would wage a costly guerrilla war until the army would “be driven to an excess of violence” against Mormon noncombatants, which would evoke the country’s sympathy for the Saints. The nation would then be forced to “make peace with the Mormons just after we had advertised their new creed to all the nations of Christendom, given them a martyrology, and driven every hysteric preacher of their unhappy band stark mad with prophecy, miracle-working and babble in the unknown tongue.”⁷⁴ Kane also lobbied Buchanan, who came out in opposition to the anti-polygamy legislation. During Kane’s interview with the president, according to Cannon, Buchanan “launched out immediately and scarcely left him [Kane] anything to say . . . He did not want us disturbed, nor any cause of trouble given us, and would use his influence with his friends to have unfriendly and unjust legislation arrested.” For the moment, opponents of the legislation prevailed, and the bill was never brought up for debate in the Senate. With the assistance of Cannon and Utah’s new territorial delegate William Hooper, Kane had once again warded off a threat to the Saints, and he sensed that the congressional actions had been the “last expiring effort” of the Saints’ enemies. Kane’s premature optimism was spectacularly misplaced. Two years later, with southerners absent, the first federal anti-polygamy bill, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, easily passed. The nation thus entered a new phase in its attempt to answer the Mormon Question; for the next thirty years, a succession of laws applied federal pressure against Mormon polygamy until the Saints abandoned the practice.⁷⁵

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As during no other time in his life, Kane shaped events of national importance during the Utah War era. His intervention relied on his previous career in Democratic, anti-evangelical reform. Kane’s view of the Utah War as a “Holy War,” propelled in large part by the culture of evangelical reform, shaped his sense of mission, as he sought to protect the religious liberty of the Saints from reformers’ meddling and federal intrusions. His status as a Democratic Party insider gave him sufficient credibility to win Buchanan’s cautious assent to his proposal; Kane also used his Democratic connections to shape perceptions of the war and policies toward the Mormons after the conflict. In addition, Kane’s involvement in the Utah War allowed him to play the role of the romantic hero on a national stage, as he risked his own safety to stand between a downtrodden people and an army bent (in his eyes) on persecution. By setting himself against the opinion of the nation and undertaking an arduous journey in the dead of winter, he had helped avert a potential catastrophe. In the Utah War and its aftermath, Kane achieved his central aims. During the war, he successfully created narratives that helped persuade the Mormons to accept Cumming as governor and that transformed Young from chief agitator to the necessary check on the Mormon war faction, someone with whom the Buchanan administration could work. Certainly, Kane made missteps as well; his rapid alienation of the army, for instance, could have ultimately harmed his mission of peace, though in actuality it strengthened his relationship with Cumming. In the immediate postwar period, Kane ensured that his vision of the Utah War’s resolution prevailed, particularly in his efforts to keep Cumming as governor, influence public opinion, and block anti-polygamy legislation. Here, too, there were failures and frustrations. Troops remained in Utah, non-Mormons flowed into the territory, an opposition newspaper sprang up, the territory was no closer to statehood, most officials—with the exceptions of the hard-drinking Governor Cumming and U.S. Attorney Wilson—remained hostile to the Saints, and continuing coverage of the Mountain Meadows Massacre mitigated Kane’s public relations efforts. While Kane may have overestimated his own importance at times, had he not intervened, the Utah War might well have escalated (and even won a place in the textbooks). In brokering the peace and then keeping the compromise in place until the Civil War, Kane ensured that the resolution of the Mormon Question would be transferred from the battlefield to the realm of politics and law. Though heated disputes continued for decades, never again would the Saints and the nation come to the brink of a shooting war. Following Kane’s opposition to the anti-polygamy legislation in 1860, a year went by before more letters passed between Young and Kane. Indeed, except

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for sporadic contacts, Kane had little to do with Mormon affairs for most of the next decade. In September 1861, Young dictated a letter, pointing out the irony that “the seat of war has been transferred from Utah to the immediate vicinity of the Capital of our government.” By then, Kane had already transitioned from peacemaker to soldier in a war the Mormons saw as divine retribution on the nation.⁷⁶

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Three years after Kane’s mediation of a threatened civil war in the West between the Mormons and the United States, the nation plunged into NorthSouth conflict. When Kane learned of the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861, he immediately telegraphed Pennsylvania governor Andrew Curtin, making him the first Pennsylvanian to volunteer for military service. Curtin accepted Kane’s offer to raise a regiment, which became known as the Bucktails, from the mountainous frontier regions of northwestern Pennsylvania. Characteristically, Kane threw himself into the war effort. Renowned for his courage (some called it recklessness), he served in the Union Army until Gettysburg, suffered wounds at three battles, was taken prisoner of war, and rose to the rank of brigadier general. Kane viewed the war as the culmination of his antislavery activities, and the conflict prompted him to sever his tumultuous relationship with the Democratic Party and become a Republican. By so doing, he trod a political path that many anti-evangelical, Democratic reformers took (though Kane arrived in the Republican ranks later than most).¹ In the months before the war’s outbreak, Kane converted for the second time to a nondenominational Christianity. His religious quest profoundly shaped his Civil War experiences. Again, neither Thomas nor Elizabeth commented on the catalyst for his conversion. Unlike his conversion preceding his Utah War travels, this second conversion stuck, and he joined Elizabeth in Christian fellowship for the final two decades of his life. The lens through which Kane viewed the war highlighted the tensions between his older reform and cultural sensibilities and his newfound Christianity. In particular, Kane struggled to reconcile the dictates of the culture of honor with the commandments of Christ. Evangelical reformers had long derided the culture of honor and successfully targeted

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its most distinguishing ritual, the duel, for banishment. By contrast, Kane and many other anti-evangelical reformers, particularly those from the South or the borderland North, continued to accept the culture of honor. Kane’s romantic attachment to medieval chivalry—which led him to see himself as a knightly soldier, a gentlemanly warrior—reinforced his attachment to this culture. His conversion meanwhile encouraged a rapprochement with evangelical reformers and prompted him to repudiate (with much ambivalence) the duel. Even so, Kane’s long immersion in the culture of honor shaped how he viewed numerous aspects of the war, including legitimate forms of combat, the relationship between military officers and politics, and his advancement in the ranks. His experiences demonstrate the enduring power of the culture of honor and the romantic fascination with chivalry in the borderland North.² Historians have used the term “culture of honor” to denote a cultural system most commonly associated with the antebellum South. At the heart of this culture was the importance of an individual’s and a family’s public reputation; the opposite of honor was shame. The imperative to preserve one’s reputation from slights or hints of dishonor explains many of the peculiar features of this system, as Kane illustrated in his duel challenge to Albert Sidney Johnston during the Utah War. The culture of honor was also closely allied with notions of hierarchy and gentility. Gentlemen sharply distinguished themselves from the lower and middle classes, and both the ideology and the rituals of the culture of honor reinforced these distinctions.³ In the eighteenth century, North and South shared the culture of honor, but northern mores changed rapidly in the late 1700s and early 1800s, spurred by the integration of northerners into a market economy and the expansion of evangelical religion. Honor in the North came to mean respectability, defined by freedom from illicit vices. Northern duels, especially after the ill-fated and muchlamented duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804, became increasingly rare. A wave of antidueling legislation swept through the northern states during the first decades of the nineteenth century; states also passed libel and slander laws to give gentlemen legal recourse to defend their good names. In addition, gentility became rapidly democratized in the early 1800s, particularly in the North, as notions of meritocracy and the widespread availability of luxury goods—clocks, tablecloths, silverware—allowed the middle class to feel and act like gentlemen and ladies. Southern attitudes shifted much more slowly, and the culture of honor, with its most celebrated feature, the duel, continued to be central to elite southern culture.⁴ Kane was never entirely comfortable in the newly democratized world of the antebellum North and identified with the southern gentry, who for him personi-

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fied honor and gentility. He regularly employed democratic rhetoric but also maintained a sharp distinction between gentlemen and the middle and lower classes. Kane’s Civil War associates almost invariably mentioned his gentlemanly status or pretensions. One fellow officer admired his “estimable work as a gentleman,” while a brigade doctor wrote home, “he is very much of a gentleman.” General Alpheus Williams cast Kane’s demeanor in a more negative light, calling him a “little man of rather petit-maitre manners,” suggesting an affected and showy gentility, but he nevertheless thought Kane “full of pluck and will.” Gentility and honor encompassed more than financial wealth. During the war, the Kanes fretted about their finances constantly, but this did not disqualify Kane. Gentlemanly status had more to do with behavior and attitude than money. In his view, the masses of the army consisted of “pugilists and stable boys, men of hard consciences and broken and dirty finger nails, users of whiskey and tobacco and wearers of woolens.” He saw himself as a “gentleman among blackguards, a freeman in bonds, a clean man in the dirt, a citizen whose every feeling loathe[s] the soldiers calling.” Certainly, Kane did not despise the lower classes as a whole; rather, he defended the downtrodden. Those below him could be the object of his sympathy and philanthropy, but not his equals.⁵ Though northerners, the Kane family was clearly influenced by the culture of honor. Antebellum Philadelphia served as a meeting ground between North and South, a national center of business and culture. In addition, Thomas and his siblings often spent their youthful summers in Virginia with southern relatives. Elisha attended the University of Virginia, and Thomas’s younger brothers Pat and John married into southern-sympathizing families. The Kanes were also well aware of the duel. In the early 1840s, Thomas dreamed of chasing an unknown man who had wounded his father in a duel. As a naval officer in the mid1840s, Elisha twice challenged one of his fellow officers to a duel, which the other officer declined. After Elisha’s death, his sometime lover Margaret Fox, a famous spiritualist whom the Kanes considered beneath their social status, claimed that Elisha had secretly married her. Fox threatened that unless Elisha’s estate, which included ongoing royalties from his best-selling books, supported her as his widow, she would publish a book of their love letters, which she knew would scandalize the Kanes. According to family tradition, Thomas resolved the litigation by threatening the opposing lawyers “with a promise of a pistol full of real ammunition.” The experience of the Kane brothers suggests that honor retained its relevance to many elite northerners (especially those outside of New England and the culture of evangelical reform) long after most historians suggest that honor lost its cultural power in the North.⁶ Antebellum Americans like the Kanes grafted new notions of chivalry onto

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their ideals of honor as part of a broader attraction to romanticism and its interest in the medieval European past. Chivalry invaded the United States primarily through the vastly popular novels about honorable knights and medieval maidens by the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott and his imitators. The lure of chivalry, while felt nationwide, found a special place in the South. After the war, Mark Twain asserted, “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” Elite southerners particularly latched on to chivalry, in part to combat charges about their cruelty to slaves. In ring tournaments, would-be southern knights donned medieval garb and rode their horses through a course while trying to catch rings on lances. Literature of the era frequently invoked the chivalric code to contrast the generous and hospitable southern cavalier with the grasping and cold Yankee. In an era of rapid social changes, chivalry soothed anxieties by recalling supposedly timeless virtues imbued in medieval knights. One historian defined the central features of the chivalric ideal as “courtesy, deference to women, hospitality to strangers, defense of his honor, consideration for social inferiors.” Chivalry “was intended to soften honor’s rougher aspects,” as it demanded magnanimity, self-restraint, and the cultivation of the “finer feelings of human nature.”⁷ Attraction to chivalry was not confined to the South. While northerners like the Kanes did not participate in such elaborate displays as ring tournaments, they nevertheless often integrated chivalry into their worldview. Many Americans of both the North and the South seemed to sense in manly chivalry a response to the feminizing ideals of evangelical reform. Kane accepted the chivalric ideal and envisioned himself during the Civil War as a courageous and honorable knight. Other northerners likewise used the language of chivalry to describe him. A fellow officer thought Kane had appeared “in the midst of the battle smoke of Gettysburg like one of those old mysterious Knights of chivalric ages.” Elizabeth compared his “peculiar temperament” to a “knight of the Middle Ages.” One Bucktail published a poem that described Kane: “Their leader might have been a knight, / In times of which minstrels sing.”⁸ During the war, Kane repeatedly expressed his relationship with chivalry through identification with the fictional character Sintram from Sintram and His Companions, an 1814 novel by the German romantic Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué. Set in a mythical and medieval Norway, Sintram explores the relationship between chivalry and Christianity. Born to the pure Verena and the often wicked knight Biorn of the Fiery Eyes, Sintram was plagued with constant dreams and visitations of two hideous figures, personifications of Satan and Death. He fluctuated constantly between a soft and gentle

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side of his personality that sought to protect humanity (inherited from Verena, who had entered a convent) and a wild and brutal streak (from Biorn). This struggle struck a chord in Kane, who feared that war might transform his own character; after his first skirmish, he wrote Elizabeth, “There are times when I fear that I am the old Father with the wicked eyes more than the Son.” In the dictates of the culture of honor, particularly the demand that he duel to defend his reputation, Kane saw Sintram’s “little Master” (Satan) tempting him. Sintram’s relationship with Christianity, like Kane’s own, oscillated between devotion and rejection. Eventually, through the example of a righteous Christian knight and the prayers of Verena, Sintram triumphed over Satan and saved himself and his father. Kane cast Elizabeth in the role of his Verena, who would guide him toward righteousness. His wartime perceptions, including his identification with Sintram, indicate that chivalry profoundly influenced him.⁹ Kane examined the war through the lens of honor and chivalry, but he initially tried to avoid war altogether. Given his antislavery sentiments, he took one of the most unusual steps in his long political odyssey by allying himself with southern Democrats during the campaign of 1860. He supported the presidential campaign of Kentucky’s John C. Breckenridge, Buchanan’s vice president, after the Democratic Party splintered along sectional lines. The northern Democrats nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas (whom Kane had previously supported), while the party’s southern faction opted for Breckenridge. Certainly, Breckenridge—who ran on a proslavery platform that emphatically denounced interference with the Fugitive Slave Law—attracted few antislavery agitators. Kane genuinely hoped for sectional reconciliation and believed the election of a southerner the best way to ensure it. After Abraham Lincoln’s election, Elizabeth confessed that her husband was “a little irritated with me” for her pronorthern views, as he feared the Republican victory would lead to war. She retorted (at least to her diary), that he held the blame for her opinions, as “I was such a child when I married him that my notions are formed merely on what I conceived his to be.” “Never mind, Mr Tom,” she resolved, “I know who paid for Passmore Williamson’s comforts when in prison, I wonder if the South wouldn’t like to know too!”¹⁰ Kane’s pacifism and national reputation as a peacemaker caused him to approach the Civil War with unease. Noting the seeming inconsistency between his pacifist ideals and wartime service, Elizabeth wrote that Thomas “explained it to himself by maintaining that he was but a volunteer policeman to restore order” rather than a soldier at war. Many conservative pacifists like Kane distinguished between government action as a last resort to suppress insurrection, a legitimate reason to fight, and unjust war between sovereign nations. In addition,

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Kane initially conceived of the raising of northern troops as the “best preventive of war.” By the time he declared himself a Republican in September 1861, however, Kane had come to believe that the only “Road to Peace” was through the war’s “vigorous prosecution.” True sectional peace could be achieved only through “teaching the South, severely to respect us,” talking about the North as if it were a man ready to duel. Kane also cast his internal political struggle in terms of competing scriptural injunctions: “Peace, Peace at any price, and every thing for Peace is the teaching of the Master, but He also teaches to let the oppressed go free and a number of other inconvenient inconsistent things.” Finally, he justified combat through his Democratic belief in the spread of liberty. As a brigadier general, he lectured new recruits to “Save America whose cause is sacred—identified with Liberty—proclaimed to be the cause of Liberty to all mankind.” Likewise, he encapsulated his motivation to his mother “in one word: Liberty.”¹¹ Though he saw war as the path to peace, Kane remained ambivalent and worried that the excitement of battle often drowned out his pacifist inclinations. Following his first skirmish, he admitted to Elizabeth, “I am stirred by trumpets and firing and the cheers of comrades when they follow me,” causing him to “forget for moments to mourn over this fratricidal war, and ask Christ to forgive us our success.” To his daughter Harriet, he characterized war as “very sorrowful and painful” to “all good men engaged in it, except when they are excited by battle or chasing the enemy.” His ambivalence continued into the postwar period, when Kane reflected: “My own private experience of the war was simply horrible. I hope as I grow older I grow less prone to think complacently of horse-stealing and scalp taking—the sum of all outrages which we euphemistically designate as war.” After the war, he refused to display his Civil War swords, “saying he will not have a memorial of the accursed Rebellion kept before his children’s eyes.” Rather, he proudly hung up in his home “Elisha’s various gold medals, records of the triumphs of Peace.” In 1882, he expressed relief to Mormon apostle George Q. Cannon that his “old inspiration” had not “left him in consequence of the blood on his hands which he shed during the war.”¹² Even with his ambivalence, Kane successfully raised three companies of lumbermen and frontiersmen in the heavily Democratic “Wild-Cat” region of the Alleghenies. He merged his companies with others from northwestern Pennsylvania to form the Bucktails, or the Kane Rifles, which became one of the most storied regiments of the war. One of Kane’s recruits placed a deer’s tail on his hat, inspiring Kane to give the regiment its label. Wearing this unique insignia, Kane’s soldiers received almost instant celebrity as sharpshooting, rowdy frontiersmen who had descended from the mountains to whip the Confeder-

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FIGURE 11. Thomas Kane in his Civil War uniform. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.)

ates. A newspaper described the Bucktails as “rugged, rough looking-men,” who nonetheless possessed as “well-set minds, and as well-formed characters for the service before them, as any which the army can produce.” The paper depicted Kane as an amalgam of gentlemanly attributes and heroic actions (just as Kane perceived himself ): “Finely and highly accomplished as study and travel can make a man of action, and with his life already crowded with adventures requiring talent, tact, and heroism, there is the happiest fitness in his relation to the hardy mountaineers under his command.”¹³ Kane’s recruitment of the Bucktails involved family drama. Elizabeth gave birth to their third child, Evan, on April 6, 1861. To not upset her postpartum recovery, Kane told her only that he was going to the mountains on business. She discovered otherwise when she saw his activities referred to in a local newspaper. While Elizabeth “struggled to keep cheerful,” she wrote, “no one can tell what a

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blow it was that all around me knew he was gone, and I alone was ignorant.” She believed this trauma affected Evan’s health as her “nursing betrayed” her: “Born the fattest and healthiest of my children, he dwindled from the day I began to pine over his father’s loss.” Elizabeth eventually reconciled herself to Kane’s decision and took pride in his wartime service.¹⁴ Kane’s military title of lieutenant colonel was essentially an honorary one, procured through his father’s political influence almost two decades previously. As such, he quietly recruited another Philadelphia lawyer and heir of a famous political family, Charles J. Biddle, who had served in the Mexican-American War, to lead the regiment. Displaying his keen sense of pageantry, Kane had himself elected colonel and then stepped aside for Biddle, while accepting the post of lieutenant colonel. The regimental captains then voted to officially change the unit’s name to the Kane Rifle Regiment. Newspapers hailed Kane’s patriotism in placing country above self while others scurried to secure rank. Kane also expressed his approval, writing home, “the election of Biddle having relieved me from responsibility, I eat and sleep like a porker and fatten accordingly.” After the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 (in which the Bucktails did not participate), Kane saw the northern loss as justification for his decision to step aside as colonel. Although he considered himself highly qualified for some military work—“to cross mountains, to scour ravines, to march with one small body of men quickly and unexpectedly to surprise another”—Kane knew he lacked the ability to train and discipline large numbers of troops.¹⁵ Over the next few months, however, tensions between Kane and Biddle mounted, a result of conflicts over electoral politics and military campaigns. He and Biddle clashed, Kane wrote to Elizabeth, because “the duality of our command has been an embarrassment to both of us.” Even so, he did not want a “whisper breathed” of their difficulties. He explained, “I treat him on principle magnificently—besides that I personally like him.” In a special election on July 2, 1861, Philadelphians chose Biddle, an ambitious Democrat, as their new congressman. One Philadelphia Republican denounced Biddle as “very southern in his sympathies, opposed to this war,” but Biddle’s military service confirmed his loyalty to most voters. Rapidly growing disenchanted with the opposition to the war effort by elements of the Democratic Party, Kane hoped that Biddle would prove a Democrat loyal to the Lincoln administration’s war policies, but he was soon disappointed. With Elizabeth’s encouragement, Kane chose the elections that fall to publicly break with the Democratic Party, ignoring his mother’s pleadings to “not abandon the political path of your Father—keep quiet.” In so doing, he opposed Biddle’s attempts to “harvest my Regimental vote for the Democrats.”¹⁶

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Biddle waited until December to resign from the army and take his seat in Congress full time. In the meantime, the Bucktails participated in a campaign in western Virginia during the summer of 1861, in which Kane believed that Biddle had acted much too timidly, and Biddle in turn saw Kane’s actions as “a little unpractical, a little visionary, theoretic, reckless, or rash.” Much to Kane’s chagrin, Biddle refused to cross into Confederate territory, even to protect Union men enduring what Kane described as a “Reign of Terror.” He viewed Biddle’s actions as politically motivated, an attempt to increase his popularity among Democratic voters. Elizabeth, meanwhile, feared her husband’s rashness and was pleased that Biddle acted “as a drag on your wheels.”¹⁷ In Kane’s view, however, the fight in western Virginia involved crucial questions of honor. During war, honor demanded certain behavior, in particular opposing guerillas and bushwhackers who “fought unfair, unchivalrous, uncivilized little wars and lacked a true gentleman-hero’s courage.” For most northerners and southerners, the savagery of war ultimately overwhelmed the concern for chivalry. Nevertheless, for Kane and many others in 1861, chivalry still represented a powerful ideal. The irregular Confederate cavalry actions in western Virginia—destroying civilians’ food supplies, “robbing Union men,” and forcing them to join the Confederate Army—demanded a response.¹⁸ Thus, Kane ignored (in his words “transcended”) Biddle’s orders and led a small group of men across the Mason-Dixon line to protect northern sympathizers and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. While in Virginia, he successfully engaged in a small fight against a Confederate cavalry unit. According to Kane, his actions forced Biddle, “this Defender of the South,” to finally cross into southern territory. Even worse in Kane’s eyes, Biddle assumed credit for Kane’s successes while continuing his own inactivity. The soldiers began to refer to Biddle as their “drilling Colonel” and Kane as their “fighting Colonel,” labels that undoubtedly increased tensions between the two men. Kane also charged that Biddle suppressed various reports that he had prepared for officers higher up the military chain of command. For Kane, honor dictated that an officer did not promote himself through publicity or political wire-pulling, and he continually derided officers, like Biddle, whom he believed sought newspaper recognition. While he claimed to eschew publicity, however, Kane became offended when Biddle supported the renaming of the unit from the Kane Rifle Regiment to the generic 13th Pennsylvania Rifles.¹⁹ Even though their relationship had deteriorated, when Biddle left for Washington, D.C., in late November, relations between him and Kane remained outwardly warm. To Elizabeth, Kane wrote in the sentimental language of the day: “B. was affected to tears on parting with me!—Stranger still, my symptoms corre-

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sponded.” Soon after, however, Kane discovered what he viewed as a conspiracy, led or at least supported by Biddle, to block his election to replace Biddle as colonel. Other Bucktails perceived Kane’s difficulty. Captain Charles F. Taylor, who thought Kane a “splendid man,” worried that “other influences are at work which, under the miserable system of electing officers, will have the effect to take away many votes from him.” Pat Kane, a friend of Biddle’s, queried Biddle, “Can there be any ‘hitch’ in the way of his taking command of the Rifles?” Biddle assured Pat that he knew of none. Accepting Biddle’s response, Pat told his brother, “Any such breach of faith in the quarter referred to is scarcely credible.” Pat traveled to Washington, near the Bucktails’ camp, to assist in his brother’s election. Elizabeth counseled patience, writing her husband that Biddle would not “wish to raise an inferior over your head. It is too unprofessional.” While Kane thanked her for “exhorting me to see the other side,” he remained confident of Biddle’s treachery and decided to challenge him to a duel.²⁰ Duels and threatened duels were far from unknown among northerners during the Civil War era. In 1860, proslavery Virginia Democratic congressman Roger A. Pryor challenged abolitionist Wisconsin Republican congressman John F. Potter. Though the duel never occurred—both men were arrested— Potter became a hero throughout the North and was given a visible role in the 1860 Republican convention that nominated Lincoln. During the war, Confederates more often fought duels, but northern officers (especially those from the sectional borderlands) also challenged each other at times. The most notorious instance occurred in 1862, when a brigadier general with the unfortunate name of Jefferson Davis killed his ex-commanding officer, Major General William Nelson, in a duel in Arkansas. Though reviled by many northerners (Elizabeth wrote that Davis, though he had been “very badly treated,” had “turned the tables against himself ” as “all one’s pity reverts to the murdered man”), Davis returned to duty with the help of political connections.²¹ Elizabeth heartily disapproved of dueling. Two years earlier, the Kane brothers had criticized the “conduct of a gentleman who had not challenged another when they deemed it necessary.” She disagreed, stating “I can see that it may be essential that a finished man of the world may be a duelist, but no shadow of reason that a Christian should.” Hoping her infant son Elisha would accept a different standard of manliness, she prayed that he would “excel in any manly exercise, and the consciousness of ability may help him to maintain the much greater courage of braving the world’s tongue if he should be called a coward.” Elizabeth succinctly recorded their disagreement: “Tom thinks a man has to fight in some cases. I do not.” During the war, she counseled Kane to accept the

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duties of Christianity over the culture of honor. Nevertheless, Elizabeth did not always view honor and Christianity as opposites; rather, she envisioned a fusion of the two (minus dueling) into a “knightly Christian honour.” To combat the popular image of effeminate Christian men, Elizabeth wanted her husband to demonstrate that a “man can be thoroughly brave, and endowed with man’s virtue . . . [and] live pure in life and heart for Christ’s sake.”²² In facing Kane’s impending duel, Elizabeth was torn between her desire to be a dutiful wife—“I have kept Tom from being successful”—and her desire to be a good Christian—“I grieve lest my dear Tom should be wronging an innocent man.” Her letters to Thomas reflected her indecision. On December 15, she promised to “no more hamper you in the course you intend taking, by my letters.” The following day, she asked (not quite keeping her promise), “if my letters hampered you, was it because they interfered with your acting in a Christian manner?” When Thomas did not answer her letters, she wrote, “either you are sick, or you are doing something you know would grieve me.”²³ At this point, Kane only was awaiting Biddle’s official resignation from the army, so that the Articles of War, which banned duels, would no longer apply. (For him, personal honor took precedence over army regulations.) Kane wrote to Colonel George D. Bayard that he wished to “publicly expose, humiliate, and, if he shows pluck enough, horsewhip and shoot the offending traitor.” On December 17, after Biddle’s resignation, Bayard (acting as Kane’s second) delivered Kane’s challenge: “My time has come. . . . If you can shoot me I will not have you sent to Fort Lafayette. Otherwise I shall denounce you as a traitor and intriguer as well as an ingrate and a liar.” Shocked, Biddle told a friend that Kane’s actions placed him outside of “the class of responsible persons” since his “alleged grievances” were “hallucinations”; thus, Biddle was not compelled to answer his challenge. Two days later, Kane again dispatched Bayard with the challenge, though this time his own brother Pat intercepted Bayard and persuaded him not to deliver it. Infuriated, Kane again sent the challenge and wrote Biddle, “Have you no sense of shame to prevent your continuing to call upon me and my family for favors?” Stung by his brother’s reaction, Pat explained that he desired Thomas to pursue a course that would force Biddle to make a “humiliating apology,” which would have been “the most killing thing he could do.”²⁴ Preparations for the duel stalled the next day as the Bucktails were unexpectedly called into battle. Kane’s capable leadership at the battle of Dranesville (fought about twenty miles from Washington near a small Virginia town), a Union victory amidst a sea of northern setbacks, vaulted him into the national spotlight. Even though Kane received a ball in the cheek and remained very ill

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FIGURE 12. Charles J. Biddle. (Reproduced by permission from the Ronn Palm Collection, Museum of Civil War Images, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.)

for the next few weeks, he remained determined to duel. Kane wanted to “post” Biddle, which meant publishing the challenge and publicly calling Biddle a coward. Bayard (cognizant of the army regulations forbidding dueling) rejected this course, saying, “I do not wish to be mixed up publicly in this matter.” Besides, Bayard feared the “world will say” that Kane “forced this thing on without permitting an explanation” from Biddle, which would be a breach in the duel ritual. Exasperated, Kane wrote the secretary of war, fellow Pennsylvanian

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Simon Cameron, claiming that “our punctured bladder ex-Brigadier Biddle of the Home Guards” would “challenge now that he hears I am under Surgeon’s orders to be upon my back and shut my eyes.”²⁵ Kane’s detractors in the regimental election, slated for late January, were already using his challenge against him, appealing to “those opposed to a barbarous code” and denouncing him for “trying to assassinate Mrs. Biddle’s spouse.” His principal opponent, Hugh W. McNeil, a captain in the regiment, even accused Kane of encouraging a duel between McNeil and another possible candidate: “Kane was fanning the flame, to get me popped out of his way, or disgrace me in the service, or have me cashiered for being implicated in a duel.” Elizabeth praised him for his heroism at Dranesville but added, “I hope your well earned satisfaction is untarnished by a fight with Biddle! . . . It is the only thing that keeps me from walking full two inches taller. I am so proud of my wounded hero!” Kane instructed her to remain in Philadelphia as she, like Sintram’s Verena, could do “more good to me in the convent.”²⁶ Elizabeth ignored this request and went to Washington to nurse Thomas back to health. He initially refused even to speak with her, but she confronted him about his plans to “shoot Biddle.” Finally, he “raised his poor wounded face and weary fevered eyes and said ‘You, why have you come? I have given myself to the devil and he will give me my revenge.’” Elizabeth argued, “And are you happy, Tom?” “I shall have justice” came the response. “Will you be happy then?” “I don’t care for happiness, I shall have justice.” She pressed him, using his recent conversion to Christianity, “Tom would it please Christ?” He conceded that it would not, but the appeal did not alter his intentions. Despairing as to how to save her husband from eternal damnation, Elizabeth made one final plea: “Tom, when we parted last you put on my ring to wed me for Eternity too. If you choose to damn your own soul, mine shall go too.” She threatened, “I swear that when you fight a duel, whether you live or die, I will cut my throat.” At last Thomas relented, expressing concern for their children, and told Elizabeth “all the temptations the devil spread before him.” He feared he would “still lose his life,” as Biddle, “urged by his friends to retrieve his honour,” would challenge him; Elizabeth would “only tie his hands and deliver him to be murdered.”²⁷ This dramatic scene illustrates in microcosm—both between the Kanes and within Thomas—one of the great cultural struggles of the nineteenth century: between an older ethic of the culture of honor and a newer set of ideals promulgated by evangelical Christianity, which in the decades before the Civil War had begun to tame and would eventually overwhelm the culture of honor. Even though Elizabeth was now convinced that “Biddle has behaved abominably,” she still feared that Kane would lose his soul if he dueled. On her urging, he

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promised not to duel and to seek peace in Christ. Kane’s acceptance of Christianity rather than honor freed his mind from the distress he felt at “Biddle’s ungrateful courses. I feel very independent of the world.”²⁸ Elizabeth, however, worried that Kane might reissue a challenge to protect his reputation. She advised him to “bear no malice,” but also to defend his reputation where he had the records to prove Biddle’s wrongdoing. However, Biddle’s “evil carefulness, and your magnanimous carelessness” meant that Kane had little proof. Therefore, she counseled to make “no unnecessary mention of him” in the upcoming regimental election, as “I would not have you succeed by denouncing B.” Elizabeth’s advice reinforced Kane’s own sense of honor, which demanded a rigid attention to duty over personal interest in the election. His opponents would seek to win by unjust means, he charged, by distributing “whiskey by the barrel” and by sending out “their bullies . . . and brawlers of lies.” While he boasted he could overcome his opponents in such a contest—“I can beat them in bullies ten for one”—such actions would dishonor him.²⁹ More than alcohol and intimidation led many Bucktails to oppose the polarizing Kane. He had earned the loyalty of many soldiers, particularly those he had personally recruited. One Bucktail called him a “gentleman and one of the bravest officers in the division; and one who will not ask a man to go where he does not take the lead himself.” Others, however, thought that Kane lacked “coolness of purpose and fairness of decision” and that his “chief aim was notoriety and that he would sacrifice every man in the regiment for self elevation.” His opponents further charged that he, not McNeil, unscrupulously influenced the election with “money, position and whiskey.” McNeil and some of his supporters also whispered that Kane had been drunk at Dranesville. Kane’s aristocratic pretensions also irritated his detractors. One McNeil supporter appealed to ideals of meritocracy and egalitarianism to depict the election as between a “man who could boast of his birth and relations, one who had gold and could buy friends in every department of life and control the press; and on the other hand a band of freemen, a regiment of men, who have left all that makes life dear, to fight for the land of their birth.”³⁰ On January 22, 1862, Kane lost the election to McNeil, garnering just more than a third of the votes. Elizabeth consoled her husband, “I am prouder of my Lieut Col’s shoulder straps than I was of the hero of Dranesville, for they are the token of a nobler victory.” Despairing, Kane threatened to resign and reenlist as a private to avoid the shame of serving under his former subordinate. Now it was Elizabeth who warned that this would “be a stain upon your honour.” She thus rejected the dichotomy that both Kanes had sometimes drawn between the culture of honor and Christianity. While she despised dueling, she wanted Thomas

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to have worldly honor, instructing him to “justify yourself to those who ought to know.” Kane thus asked General George McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, to order an investigation into his conduct in western Virginia, at Dranesville, and in the election, so that he could retain his “power to serve my country” unimpaired.³¹ Following his defeat, Kane spent most of February on leave writing a system of “Skirmish Tactics” designed for fighting in the woods, “reminiscences of what I did and what I proposed doing in Western Virginia before that sad Biddle broke up my Scout Company.” He lobbied his military superiors as a “gentleman whose honor has been wounded” to give him four Bucktail companies (those that had supported him in the election) to train in his new tactics. To McClellan, he boasted of his eminent qualifications to develop tactics for woodland fighting, citing his reputation as the “best woodsman in Northwestern Pennsylvania” and stating he had “seen something of Indian warfare.” McClellan granted Kane’s request, leading to more friction between Kane and McNeil. Kane thought his work the “most delightful thing in the world” but complained that McNeil “did vex and harass me horridly.” A McNeil partisan wrote to his hometown newspaper that Kane had “seceded” from the regiment. With his companies, Kane eagerly sought combat, asking the new secretary of war Edwin Stanton to be “immediately detailed upon service—the more trying and hazardous the better,” in part to remove him and his loyal Bucktails from McNeil’s command.³² Stationed in northern Virginia, Kane often reflected on the South, filtering his views through ideals of honor and chivalry. While he initially thought it would “feel strangely to me” to occupy Virginia “with a gang of ruffians at my heels,” he mused that the “last days of Old Virginia pride and luxury are gone.” Time in the South had “cured” him of conceiving of the region through the “old phrases of the Gallant South, the Generous South.” His illusions shattered, Kane juxtaposed his own “boyish days in these parts”—regaling his army companions with tales of the chivalrous South and “great stories of its ancient wealth and of the pure blood of its former denizens”—with southerners’ current dishonorable tactics. As tales of southern “mangling of the dead and wanton butchery of the wounded” reached his ears, Kane began to think that southerners, far from being exemplars of chivalry, “merit some overwhelming judgment.” Transgressing the boundaries of honorable conflict, southern men cravenly refused to fight Union troops in battle and engaged in murderous guerilla warfare, by “shooting our pickets, ensnaring and murdering our poor stragglers.” Southerners had become like Indians, Kane charged, without honor in their fighting.³³ Kane reconciled himself to his new view of the South by reasoning that borderland northerners had been duped into believing that the chivalrous behavior of

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the elite Virginia gentry was representative of all southerners. The “generous and liberal minded Southerners,” with whom Kane associated before the war, had been “refined and liberalised by their marriages and intercourse with ourselves and others North.” The war brought him into “frequent contact with the miserables,” poor southern whites who were “dirty, lazy, malicious, physically weak, morally unclean.” Motivated to fight only through a “blind hatred of the North, and the belief that we will set up the niggers to be their equals,” these poor whites, in Kane’s estimation, ranked below slaves. Kane tied the actions of poor whites to the need for emancipation: “We have no friend but their betters the negroes to vote them down. We might as well give up at once if we are not to free the negroes.” Thus, Kane distinguished between the honorable southern gentry and the dishonorable mass of southern whites.³⁴ In May 1862, Kane received his wish for combat when his four companies were assigned to a new Union cavalry brigade led by George Bayard (his second in the proposed Biddle duel). Known as the Flying Brigade, it was tasked with chasing Stonewall Jackson’s troops in the Shenandoah Valley. During the valley campaign, Jackson’s rapid strategic maneuvers compensated for his inferior numbers of troops and succeeded in diverting troops and attention from the main Union advance on Richmond under McClellan. On June 6, Bayard’s brigade caught up with Jackson’s rear guard under the command of the legendary cavalry officer Turner Ashby near Harrisonburg, Virginia. Ashby’s daring actions and dashing image on horseback had made him the knight-errant of the Confederacy, the living ideal of chivalry for both southerners and many northerners, including Kane.³⁵ After Ashby’s troops had beaten back part of Bayard’s brigade, Kane argued that the Union wounded left on the field should be rescued. Bayard assented and gave Kane the task. Entering some woods where the wounded lay, he led 104 Bucktails into a trap; his men found themselves heavily outnumbered by an infantry regiment and Ashby’s cavalry. After a short stand, in which Kane was shot in the right leg by a Confederate officer (whom he believed to be Ashby himself ), the Bucktails retreated, with seven dead, thirty-nine wounded, and five captured, including Kane and Captain Taylor, who had refused to leave him. As Kane struggled to sit up, a Confederate soldier slammed his rifle butt into Kane’s chest, breaking his breastbone and leaving him “for some time insensible.” Kane’s actions garnered both praise for his bravery and condemnation for his rashness. Union general George G. Meade scoffed, “I expected Kane, who has been thirsting for fame, would get himself in some such scrape.”³⁶ For the Confederates, the skirmish proved a Pyrrhic victory, as their hero Ashby lay dead on the field, killed by a Bucktail sharpshooter. After his capture,

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Kane, unbeknownst to him, uttered Ashby’s “first eulogy” when he told a Confederate captain: “I have today saved the life of one of the most gallant soldiers in either army—General Ashby—a man I admire as much as you do. . . . He was today within fifty yards of my skirmishers, sitting on his horse, unconscious of the danger he was in. I saw three of them raise their guns to fire, but I succeeded in stopping two of them and struck up the gun of the third as it went off. Ashby is too brave to die in that way.” A chivalrous soldier, Kane believed, should not die from a sniper’s bullet. Ironically, Kane, who envisioned himself a knight in soldier’s garb, precipitated the skirmish that resulted in the dishonorable death of the soldier most renowned for chivalry in either army. After the war, Kane clearly regretted Ashby’s death and minimized his own role. The incident not only demonstrates how chivalry defined appropriate action in combat for Kane, but also how the chaos of battle and the bitterness of the war rendered such concern for chivalry increasingly antiquated and impractical for most soldiers as the war wore on.³⁷ In 1862, though, officers on both sides still displayed concern for chivalrous treatment of their adversaries. While a prisoner of war, Kane believed that Confederate officers, in particular General Richard S. Ewell, treated him magnanimously, as they should a fellow gentleman-officer; according to Taylor, they allowed him “every facility to attend upon Col. Kane, whose wound, it was feared might prove serious.” The following day, Kane and Taylor were momentarily freed by Union troops and then recaptured. Confederate soldiers then hurried the prisoners south to Petersburg, Virginia. Within a week, Kane and Taylor were released across Union lines after making a sworn statement they would not rejoin the army until a formal exchange had been enacted. “Suffering from an attack of Diarrhea which threatens to become chronic,” Kane recuperated his health in Philadelphia and McKean County while awaiting his exchange.³⁸ Elizabeth’s response to Kane’s capture demonstrates the fluid boundaries between home front and war front. When word of his capture reached Philadelphia, Elizabeth insisted that she accompany his brothers Pat and John to the South to find her husband, hoping that she would “be passed through the confederate lines to nurse him.” They traveled to the Union front in Virginia and then to Baltimore, where they “learned that Tom was already at home, released on parole.” Kane’s broader wartime experiences likewise illustrate the constant flow of goods, letters, and people between army camps and northern homes. He communicated constantly, at times daily, with Elizabeth. In addition, Elizabeth and other relatives kept him well-supplied with Philadelphia goods. In February 1862, for instance, Elizabeth sent a fur vest, a pack of cards, a can of milk, nine collars, socks, gloves, gauntlets, a woven hood, a flannel case containing a comb

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and a toothbrush, rubber boots, dried apples and peaches, two hams, a small gridiron, six cans of tomatoes, a tin of milk crackers, and his mother’s daguerreotype. She also visited him numerous times in army camps (on one such occasion in February 1863 they conceived their fourth child), and Kane made occasional visits home.³⁹ Chivalry required a generous spirit, and during his recovery Kane tried to fulfill these demands. During the summer of 1862, he wrote President Lincoln, explaining that during his time as a prisoner of war, he had become aware of the extensive suffering of Confederate wounded due to lack of medical supplies. Kane asked permission to send a personal donation of quinine and chloroform along with a shipload of ice to Confederate hospitals, under flag of truce. Lincoln denied the request, an action for which Kane “never could pardon” him. His desire to be a magnanimous and honorable enemy also influenced his actions while on duty. Though “reddened as my once peace maker’s hands have been by their blood,” Kane claimed to have protected southerners from abuses by his soldiers, as “no ruffian has yet robbed or burnt a house, broken a tombstone or scared a woman in my command without prompt punishment.” In addition, he often personally purchased “Commissary stores” to relieve the suffering of hungry Confederates, especially those who had “preferred starving to take the Oath of Allegiance.” “I dare say they have informed against me,” Thomas told Elizabeth, “they certainly have informed one another if I may judge from the number who find out there is a small pork and meal placer near my Head Quarters.” Indeed, he had been warned to be on “guard against accusations that my relations with the Secesh [Confederates] were of too intimate a character.”⁴⁰ As he awaited exchange, Kane also constructed a personal narrative of the war (which he sent to Secretary Stanton), juxtaposing his own honorable actions with those of his publicity-seeking superiors, who had flourished while he languished as a lieutenant colonel. Biddle’s “arbitrary orders” in West Virginia had kept Kane from further engaging the Confederate cavalry, who subsequently contributed to the Union defeat at Bull Run. At Dranesville, his commanding general prevented him from “pursuing the enemy,” which would have revealed the “real weakness of the force which was permitted to hold the Army of the Potomac in check till spring.” His “extreme views of military propriety and honor” meant that Kane had “scrupulously avoided commenting upon the actions, despatches, or newspaper publications of my superiors in rank.” After Harrisonburg, however, he began to question “how long I should allow my countrymen to be imposed upon by ungentlemanly contrivances.” He thus told Stanton that at Harrisonburg, two infantry regiments had been ordered to support the Bucktails but had refused. If they had come to his aid, Kane asserted, the Confederates

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would have fallen back, and the campaign in the Shenandoah Valley would have been transformed into a Union victory. Rhetorically, Kane redefined honor from refusing to seek publicity or reprimand his superiors to protecting his country by revealing their dishonorable actions.⁴¹ Kane’s sense of honor was further offended when he learned that two former subordinates—including Major Roy Stone, McNeil’s close coconspirator in the election—were recruiting two new regiments to be named Bucktails. Kane derided these “Sham Bucktails” and used his connections to try to sink their efforts and have the officers disciplined. For him, Stone and the other officer symbolized the dishonorable actions that plagued the Union Army. They succeeded at everything, he charged, “but fighting, paying debts, and speaking the truth,” and sought to recruit new regiments to illegitimately obtain higher rank. Claiming he had seen “more hard fighting . . . than any Colonel in the armies of the Potomac or Virginia,” Kane stated that he would “always scorn to conciliate the populace, to court the favor of officials, or supply the public press with aliment.” His own reputation, however, was inextricably linked with the Bucktails: “I have lost rank and money since the war began, but believe my right is not contested to my own name and badge.” Kane’s conception of honor thus mixed with his resentment that others did not see his true value. His campaign, however, failed. To the chagrin of many of the original Bucktails, Stone and his associate raised two regiments of “New Bucktails.”⁴² Kane received his exchange on August 16, and though still walking with a crutch, he quickly returned to the Bucktails, stationed at Catlett’s Station, Virginia, on guard duty. As the rain poured down on August 22, Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart led fifteen hundred men on a raid to burn a nearby railroad bridge. Though initially surprised and scattered, a contingent of Bucktails rallied under Kane and prevented the destruction of the bridge (with a little help from the rain—one raider complained that in such a storm “they might just as well have tried to burn the creek!”). Elizabeth congratulated him, writing, “All the papers give you credit for saving what was saved.” Hoping the attention would get Kane promoted to brigadier general, she asked Horace Greeley to use his political connections to help. Kane would easily attain advancement, Elizabeth thought, if he would leave the Bucktails and pursue promotion “in the business fashion of nowadays, which includes the use of the Press.” Even so, she praised him for adhering to “your highest ideas of fidelity, honour and so forth, the nearer you try to be Christian in very truth, the harder and narrower the path is.” Soon after the skirmish at Catlett’s Station, the Bucktails performed rear guard duty at the Second Battle of Bull Run, helping organize and protect the Union retreat.⁴³

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In September 1862, Lincoln appointed Kane a brigadier general. Transferred from his beloved Bucktails, Kane was assigned to drill a brigade of newly enlisted troops. The next month, his brigade was reshuffled; two of his four regiments were replaced with smaller units of new soldiers enlisted for just nine months who were “so out of condition that the number who could be got out on dress parade did not exceed the number of their sick lists.” Kane sought to escape the drudgery of drilling by petitioning to be sent on active service, asking Secretary of War Stanton in January 1863 whether he had some “project of your own at heart for which you need a foolish patriot leading a party of picked men?” He also volunteered to organize the “Service of Reconnoisances” for General Joseph Hooker, the new commanding general of Union forces.⁴⁴ During these months, Kane continued his transition from an antislavery Democrat to an abolitionist Republican, and he strongly supported Lincoln’s announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. The hometown paper McKean Miner reported that Kane “had become impatient, waiting for such an utterance.” His abolitionism reopened rifts with his family reminiscent of the tumult over the Fugitive Slave Law. Elizabeth complained that the Kanes “united in denouncing the Abolitionists as the cause of all our woes” and viewed her as the “black traitress who has lured you from the pleasant paths of Pro-Slavery.” For his part, Thomas railed against his brothers Pat and John for supporting Copperhead policies (the Republican label for Democratic opposition to the war effort), marrying “traitors daughters,” and seeking “their own health and their own ease.” According to Elizabeth, Thomas believed that “through our means God would purge our land of Slavery.” Following Lincoln’s announcement, Elizabeth told him that he now marched “under your own banner.” Kane engaged with freed slaves on a personal level, as he hired a contraband (a slave who had escaped to Union lines), Scipio, to be his servant. Kane thought Scipio a “good man if he is a black one” and helped him set up an account to “pay for running off ” his wife and children, still enslaved in Virginia. After the war, Scipio accompanied the Kanes to McKean County, refusing to leave Kane’s service even though Philadelphia promised better economic prospects for a freedman.⁴⁵ One of Kane’s envisioned schemes to secure more active service during the winter of 1862–63 combined abolitionism with ambition, as he asked Elizabeth’s permission to seek a post as an officer of a unit of black soldiers, if he could “make no spunk out of white men.” She rejected the idea, as it would give the (correct) impression he had been “intriguing for personal advancement.” Raising the specter of free blacks, and reflecting Kane’s own views expressed in his “Africanization of America,” she added, “I fear that there will be hard work for

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the white officers who try to restrain the passions of the black soldiers” especially when they were “let loose upon the plantations.” Elizabeth did not want her husband “playing Frankenstein with a black monster you can’t hold in check.” Kane acquiesced, though he insisted on his radical inclinations: “I wish you to know how much nearer I am in sympathy with the men who would arm the slaves than those who are stirring up the base passion of our low whites at home.” This disgust for the rise of Copperhead sentiment, plus his abolitionism, solidified Kane’s ties with the Republican Party.⁴⁶ War also transformed Kane’s views on the death penalty. Though he had written “so much one day against Capital Punishment for any crime,” Kane vowed in October 1861 to “press hard to have the Death penalty inflicted on the first sentinel I convict of falling to sleep upon the outposts.” Wartime necessity trumped reform ideals. As a brigadier general preparing for battle, Kane ordered his captains to summarily impose “the Death Penalty on Stragglers” retreating without orders and threatened to personally shoot any officer who disobeyed. “These are my orders,” he proclaimed. “Your acts under them are my acts not yours. My conscience is answerable for them.” At Gettysburg, one of Kane’s soldiers remembered him “pointing a revolver at retreating soldiers, and threatening to shoot those who wished to leave the field,” a scene immortalized in a painting by Peter Rothermel (see Figure 13). In the context of war, Kane saw some of his youthful reform commitments as quixotic.⁴⁷ Kane’s political transition and views of honor muddled his chances of Senate confirmation in March 1863 to the brigadiership to which Lincoln had appointed him the previous fall. He refused to allow his brigade to express loyalty to the Republicans out of a “sense of honor and military duty.” While he had “by unceasing exertions of personal influence republicanized my command,” he opposed “giving men in the army officers or privates, the right to vote.” If soldiers could support Republicans, they would also have to be allowed to engage in Democratic politics and to “express opinions adverse to the Administration,” which Kane would not allow. He thus refused to “make a profession of political sentiments,” explaining to Lincoln his opposition “on principle to voting or speech making by men who have subscribed and are bound by the Articles of War.” Combined with his well-known Democratic ties and rumors of his “charities to the Rebels,” Kane’s refusal to openly support Republicans led some senators to suspect his loyalty. Elizabeth confirmed that “reports were afloat connecting you with the Copperheads, although other reports affirmed your loyalty as strongly.”⁴⁸ The confirmation process reinforced Kane’s self-image as honorably refusing to advance himself politically. Elizabeth concurred with Thomas that a “little

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toadying to Lincoln and his wife, a little lounging about Washington” would have secured his nomination. While Kane outwardly eschewed lobbying on his own behalf, he nevertheless asked trusted allies for help in his confirmation. Even this he depicted in terms of honor. To one, he wrote, “You remember my monkish notions—I have not condescended to write to any gentleman in political life upon the subject of my military notions—but I cannot resist addressing you my old personal friend to ask you to see justice done me.” The Senate’s Committee on the Conduct of the War voted against Kane’s nomination, but support from Pennsylvania political allies led the full Senate to confirm him. After his confirmation, with the opportunity for dishonorably seeking advancement past, Kane assured Lincoln of his personal affiliation with the Republican Party and the “patriotism of my Brigade.” He even suggested that the “remnant of my old Bucktails” be dispatched against the “enemy at home” to quell tumult over the upcoming northern draft.⁴⁹ Even as he secured his brigadiership, Kane was considering his resignation from the army. Through the winter, Thomas and Elizabeth negotiated a resignation date in the late spring to preserve his employment with the McKean and Elk Company. He pondered a possible delay, as a Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania seemed possible. He reasoned: “I am but one, I know it. But I have seen enough to show me the value of one. I have not yet seen one Brigadier General in battle do his duty!” Kane’s commanding officer General Henry W. Slocum also encouraged him not to resign, as it “might discourage some good men.” Rather, Kane should ask for a leave of absence, as his service “entitled” him “to have his health restored at the expense of the Country.” Unsure as to whether honor required resignation or an extended leave of absence, he sought Stanton’s opinion, “not as the Secretary of War but as a Gentleman and man of honor.” While he awaited Stanton’s advice (which never arrived), Kane decided not to resign immediately, telling a disappointed Elizabeth that such an action “might be misinterpreted,” especially because of his “many Democratic friends and relatives.” Even so, he pledged “upon my oath and honor as a gentleman . . . to resign on the spot if you can write me one word that you will love and respect me as much as ever.” If not, he would continue in his “converted pagan style” to “fight with you for Christ’s Cause of Liberty.”⁵⁰ While he considered resignation, Kane still hungered to fight. He pressed Slocum and Stanton for active service, writing that his training of the ninemonth soldiers (whose term expired in May) would be wasted “if they are not soon taken into action.” Kane’s soldiers perceived his desire for combat. One wrote home, “if there is any chance he will get us where we will get some of our heads broke but never mind it is a soldiers business to fight.” Nevertheless,

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Kane deeply felt the responsibility for his “own flock, the two thousand sons of mothers who are committed to my charge.” He soon received his wish, as the Army of the Potomac clashed with the Army of Northern Virginia outside of Chancellorsville, Virginia, in late May.⁵¹ Before the Battle of Chancellorsville, Kane wrote letters to his two oldest children, in case he should be killed, that focused on his conceptions of honor and gentility. To Harriet, then seven, he regretted that he had focused on “making money for my children” rather than “taking holiday with you, teaching you, playing with you, or trying to show myself in what I still regard as my true character.” Since he thought it “honorable for people who are not rich to be economical,” Kane had “dressed badly and had things about me which were cheap and not such things as the people whom the servants call gentlemen own.” While his daughter had only known him as a “coarse absent minded lawyer,” he defended himself, “I was a gentleman, for all that.” Elizabeth could attest that when they married, he was “always very nice in my language then, and finished in my deportment. . . . She never knew any one who was more particular about the freshness of his linen his perfumes and the dressing of his hair and his hands and feet. . . . I associated with what are called nobles in beautiful France, and they taught me their ways of eating, dancing, fencing, waltzing, riding on horseback, entering rooms, going up and down stairs, writing and sealing letters.” In potentially his final letter to his daughter, Kane hoped to be remembered as a polished gentleman, notwithstanding his financial struggles and lack of leisure. To six-year-old Elisha, he wrote, “Fight for your Father’s name if it is slighted, by making your own name bright.” Significantly, Kane had accepted Elizabeth’s vision of their son’s ability to select a different definition of manhood than he had for most of his own life. Rather than duel to protect Kane’s reputation, Elisha should redeem the family name through his successes.⁵² His letters complete, Kane turned his attention to his first active combat since autumn, which turned out distressingly bad for himself and the northern cause. Though the Union boasted almost twice as many troops, Robert E. Lee’s maneuvering and the hesitancy of the leading northern generals led to a demoralizing defeat, setting the stage for Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania. In the midst of battle, Kane scrawled a message to Elizabeth on the back of an envelope “in the dark as a trifling light would invite the enemy’s fire upon my poor men who are resting tired hungry and blanketless after their fatiguing day.” “I have lost my Senior Colonel and a large number of my other best officers and men,” Kane lamented, “but God has spared me through a series of escapes.” His close encounters had left “two holes in pantaloons coat & greatcoat.” Two days later, he sent another hurried letter telling Elizabeth that he had “quarrelled I fear

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with nearly every one above me” about the Union tactics. He signed the letter, “Your Sintram.” Kane’s brigade played a crucial role in the Union retreat. The New York Herald reported that Kane, “who is always called on for hard work,” supervised the construction of a temporary bridge overnight to aid the retreat. Kane’s immediate superior General John W. Geary praised him: “By his energy, determination, and force of will, he maintained the most perfect discipline in the entire command.”⁵³ During the retreat, Kane’s horse “rolled over in swimming the Rappahannock,” and Kane, “obliged to keep on the wet clothes,” soon contracted pleurisy and pneumonia. His health throughout the war had never been good—he suffered almost continuously, battling rheumatism, ague, neuralgia, and effects from his war wounds (including impaired eyesight from Dranesville and a limp and stomach cramping from Harrisonburg)—but it was now at the breaking point. A month before Chancellorsville, his brigade doctor called him a “constant patient” and a “cripple.” After the battle, army surgeons attested that it was “absolutely necessary to prevent permanent disability” to send Kane home on sick leave. He returned to Philadelphia “very ill” and continued “delirious” for several days.⁵⁴ After a month recovering in Philadelphia, Kane traveled to the Alleghenies, where Elizabeth hoped he would “gather strength rapidly” and work for the McKean and Elk Company. When Confederate troops crossed into Pennsylvania in early June, she worried, “Tom will be leaving work at sixes and sevens, and dashing down, sick or well to report himself.” She suspected that her husband’s inclination to return to the army could not be attributed to “pure patriotism”; “mingled with it I am sorry to find some alloy of ambition and some desire for the fine pay.” Elizabeth’s prediction proved correct, as Kane hurried to the War Department in Washington, barely avoiding detection by the “Southern cavalry and bush whackers” en route. While in Washington, Stanton asked Kane to deliver to Gettysburg the key to a new telegraphic cipher, as the Confederates had recently broken the Union code. Given a horse and buggy, he traveled to Gettysburg in civilian’s clothes; according to Elizabeth, a party of Confederate cavalry arrested the suspicious Kane, but he “got away from them in the confusion of the time.”⁵⁵ Kane rejoined his corps—the Union 12th, commanded by generals Alpheus S. Williams and Geary—about midnight on July 1, after the first day of fighting. He initially took command of his brigade; however, because of his weakness, he ordered Colonel George A. Cobham to resume leadership, though Kane remained unofficially involved in the command structure. On July 2, Kane’s brigade of roughly 650 men formed on the right of Culp’s Hill and built fortifi-

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cations for an anticipated attack. As expected, Confederate troops under General Ewell (one of Kane’s opponents at Harrisonburg) began a bombardment of Culp’s Hill that afternoon, but Kane’s corps was ordered to reinforce Union troops elsewhere at Gettysburg. Confused by the terrain, Geary led his troops (including Kane’s brigade) in the wrong direction; when they returned to Culp’s Hill late that evening, they found Confederate forces occupying some of their fortifications. Kane and his brigade assumed new positions higher up Culp’s Hill and waited for a Confederate attack, which began at 4:30 the following morning.⁵⁶ The Union stand amidst an intense bombardment on Culp’s Hill for the next seven hours, involving some eighteen thousand troops on both sides, proved crucial to the overall northern victory at Gettysburg. One Confederate soldier called it the “heardest contested battle of the war”; another added, “So terific was the strife that scarcely a leaf or limb was left on the surrounding trees.” Kane remarked that the approaching enemy, whose attack came in three separate waves, “appeared to us only as closed in mass.” His brigade “kept up a fire of unintermitting strength” and “justified their reputation as marksmen.” One soldier remembered that Kane, though “sick and weak,” spent the battle “issuing his orders many times from the steps of an ambulance that was riddled with shot and shell.” Confederate casualties on Culp’s Hill numbered three hundred killed, fifteen hundred wounded, and another six hundred captured or missing, while the Union army suffered two hundred killed, seven hundred wounded, and fifty captured or missing. One of Kane’s soldiers wrote, “It was one of the most awful sights” as the Confederate “dead were literally piled in heaps.” The victory proved costly for Kane’s weakened health, as he reinjured his leg wound and “so overdrew my slender resources of strength” that his physicians recommended he no longer serve.⁵⁷ Kane illustrated his sense of honor at Gettysburg. After his capture at Harrisonburg, in which he had been kindly treated by Ewell and troops of the Confederate First Maryland Regiment, he vowed if he ever met “any of them again in service he would one way or other reciprocate.” Following the final charge on Culp’s Hill, which included troops of the First Maryland under Ewell, many wounded Confederates lay dying on the hill. Honorable conduct, and his personal vow, demanded sparing the wounded; Kane “sought to save their lives by ordering the firing to cease” but “was unable to do so in the din and excitement of the moment.” Some of the Confederate soldiers, he recalled, “asked for their lives; some of them were seen to rise from the ground to raise their hands above their heads and lower them to their sides by successive motions.” Believing them still fighting, the Union soldiers poured bullets into them “more ruthlessly.” Im-

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pressed with his opponents’ “furious bravery,” he ordered an “inspection of the canteens of the dead and wounded” to dispel the notion they had fought drunk and thereby protect their posthumous honor.⁵⁸ With the victory secure, Kane’s thoughts immediately turned to home. He told Elizabeth, “It really seems as if our victory was as complete as we at first believed . . . but now the excitement is over I want rest, and must give some time to business.” After a brief assignment to “command the Depôt for Drafted men at Pittsburg,” Kane returned home permanently. He decided he could honorably take a leave of absence to recuperate his health while he finished his manuscript on woodland battle tactics. (Though he obtained a copyright, Kane’s “Instructions for Skirmishers” was never published.) The itch for action still infected him at times, and he offered to go to New York City to help enforce the draft during riots in the weeks following Gettysburg. His “experience of street fighting in Europe” (which Kane either exaggerated or fabricated) constituted his “fitness perhaps for the performance of this duty.” The army declined Kane’s offer, and he officially resigned in early November 1863.⁵⁹ After his resignation, Kane moved his family permanently to McKean County (during the war, Elizabeth and their children had lived in Philadelphia with his aunt Ann Thomas) where he resumed his position as land agent of the McKean and Elk Company. He had remained agent during his military service, occasionally conducting work while on leave or instructing Elizabeth on matters. Until the war ended, Kane followed it closely. In July 1864, Elizabeth wrote: “There has been a rebel raid and Tom went down to offer his services, but, fortunately the Rebs took themselves off, and he came home a week ago. He has been sick ever since.” The Kanes continued strong supporters of the Republicans and the Union war effort. Elizabeth exulted in Lincoln’s 1864 electoral triumph: “Thank God Lincoln is elected! That means I hope a free country for our children to love, and a great one.”⁶⁰ Kane’s longing for a world of honor and chivalry made it easier for him to support rapid sectional reunion following the war. Henry Kyd Douglas, a staff officer of Stonewall Jackson, met Kane after the war at the Pennsylvania legislature, where Douglas was “trying to get an appropriation to remove the Confederate dead from Gettysburg.” Kane instantly promised support and testified before the relevant committees “with so much impetuous feeling that he seemed to make it a matter of personal patriotism.” Kane’s war wounds, Douglas noted, “gave emphasis to his words.” He also personally established a “small fund . . . for the burial of the remains of the Confederate Dead” at Gettysburg.⁶¹ Kane’s conception of honor allowed him to reconcile with his former adversaries, particularly Confederate officers of his own social class who held simi-

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lar views of honor. Of the Confederate officers who “thrashed” the Bucktails at Harrisonburg—“Jackson, Ewell, Ashby and [Edward] Johnson”—Kane wrote, “I am proud enough to have engaged in the same tests with these personages.” Indeed, he would feel it a “personal affront” if anyone attacked the “honor or veracity of General Johnson,” though Kane did not personally know him. In correspondence with Peter Rothermel, who had been commissioned by the state of Pennsylvania to paint a massive (16 by 32 feet) portrayal of Pickett’s Charge and four smaller scenes of Gettysburg (including Culp’s Hill), Kane urged proper respect for their “brave antagonists.” For her part, Elizabeth could not “forgive the Rebels . . . I never wish to cross a Southern threshold, nor to clasp a Southern hand.” Her husband, however, “is not so bitter against them, and has done many a kindness to Southerners since the war. He keeps his anger, and saves his ammunition, for the Copperheads and warriors of the political platforms who fomented the passion of both parties.” Thus, the language of honor both helped pave the way for a sectional reunion based on white manhood and caused Kane to forever begrudge what he saw as the cowardly actions of northern opponents of the war.⁶² Kane also cast in terms of honor the inevitable arguments over the memory of the war, particularly the conduct of Union officers in various battles. In a replay of the war itself, he believed that inferior officers who cultivated relationships with newspapers invariably (if dishonorably) won the skirmishes over reputations. General Alpheus Williams commiserated with Kane about the deleterious influence of the press, sniffing that John W. Geary, Pennsylvania’s governor after the war, had reaped the benefits of his wartime service because he “knew the value” of “newspaper scribblers,” even though he did not deserve “a tithe from the country what your services merited.” The lesson, Williams complained, “is that those of us who attended to our duties & thought nothing of the history that newspaper men were getting up for their favorites were little thought of by the Government or the people.” Kane prided himself on ignoring “what has been set up by the printers as History” and asserted, “I do continue to be pretty careless of newspaper praise or blame.” Though he grumbled, Kane received recognition and was brevetted a major general in 1866 “for gallant conduct and distinguished service” at Gettysburg.⁶³ Although the Civil War transformed aspects of Kane’s relationship with social reform, his conduct suggests his continued affiliation with an anti-evangelical, romantic reform ethos. The war catalyzed Kane’s political journey from an antislavery Democrat to an abolitionist Republican. His religious conversion provoked a clash between his former allegiance to the culture of honor and his new beliefs. Evangelical reformers targeted the culture of honor, and especially

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dueling, for extinction. At times, Kane accepted the juxtaposition between the culture of honor and Christianity, as when he abandoned dueling; for the most part, however, he sought to meld the two into a “knightly Christian honour” (in Elizabeth’s words).⁶⁴ The culture of honor and romantic chivalry, though weakened, had not completely withered away in the North. Particularly in the borderlands between the North and the South, and among elite northerners like Kane with connections to the South, the ethic of honor remained powerful. While most dramatically illustrated by his duel challenge, the culture of honor permeated his Civil War experiences, including how he perceived himself and his troops, his notions of legitimate actions in warfare, and his treatment of and reconciliation with his foes. While his deeds deserve a place in the military history of the war, his expression of chivalry and honor merit more attention in the cultural history of Civil War America.

FIGURE 13. Repulse of General Johnson’s Division by General Geary’s White Star Division (1870), by Peter F. Rothermel. Kane is in the lower-right corner, threatening to shoot retreating Union troops. (Reproduced by permission from the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.)

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Six years after Thomas’s resignation from the army, Elizabeth looked back with satisfaction on their joint efforts in reform, noting with particular pleasure the increasing acceptance of female physicians. She also commented: “Slavery is abolished, the Soil is Free, the States are gradually adopting the Constitutional Amendment which gives the Right of Suffrage to the Black Man. Utah is powerful. In short ‘respectable and prudent people’ have ranged themselves where Tom and his ‘queer friends’ stood to be pilloried in former years.” Elizabeth cast reform in the language of religious duty; rather than write “that the ‘causes’ in which we strove are triumphant,” she preferred to say, “If this work is complete, He who invited us to labor in His vineyard still says ‘Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white to Harvest.’”¹ In his remaining two decades following his return from war, Thomas labored for reform in the “fields” of temperance, the governance of charitable institutions, and the protection of the Mormons’ religious liberty. His work in developing a community in the Allegheny Mountains of northwestern Pennsylvania (named for himself ) framed these efforts. Notable similarities connected his reform activities before and after the Civil War. Kane continued to express his views through shifting political allegiances; Reconstruction politics, especially his support of leniency toward the South, led him to temporarily abandon the Republican Party. Though crippled by his wartime wounds, he still pursued the ideal of the romantic hero, envisioning a variety of plans to create adventure, wealth, and fame. These schemes—perhaps the result of a midlife crisis, as he struggled to equal his earlier achievements— remained ultimately unfulfilled. Kane’s reforming ideals also continued to develop, foreshadowing larger

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changes in the American reform ethos during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Kane’s earlier reforms had revolved around the Jacksonian Democratic concept of liberty, defined largely as the lack of interference by the government in an individual’s life and the national economy. During the postwar years, however, Kane expressed a willingness to use government power to achieve his reform objectives, a recognition that liberty should sometimes be subordinated to achieve social order. He hoped to make his town a temperance community by using not only personal persuasion, but also government prohibitions and vigilantism. Kane also became the first president of the Pennsylvania Board of State Charities, a government committee charged with the investigation and oversight of institutions ranging from orphanages to penitentiaries. Finally, the categories of evangelical and anti-evangelical reform lost some of their salience for Kane, a result of his conversion and shifting political loyalties as well as larger trends in the national reform scene. He thus represented the broader transition between antebellum and Progressive reform. Kane’s fragile health, perpetually on the verge of collapse throughout his life and now worsened by his combat wounds, cast a long shadow over his final two decades. In 1869, Brigham Young Jr. reported to his father that Kane “has changed much since I saw him in 1862. I would not have recognised him had we met in the street. He wears a full beard which is quite gray and his features are pinched and drawn as if [he] endured constant pain; he is even much thinner than usual and I assure you it made me feel sad to see this physical change in one of our best friends.” The ball Kane took to the face at Dranesville left him with “repeated abscesses in [the] upper jaw” and “neuralgia and impaired eye sight” for the remainder of his life. For several years, he “suffered from spitting of blood and severe pain” from his broken breastbone at Harrisonburg. His leg wound from Harrisonburg rendered him “more or less a cripple,” who “had to be lifted off his horse,” who could “take no active exercise,” and who generally used either crutches or a walking stick. In 1871, Kane underwent a “dreadful,” though unsuccessful, operation on his leg, and his doctors privately spoke to Elizabeth “about taking off his leg at the knee, should he ever get strong enough to endure the operation.” The amputation never occurred and Kane’s leg continued to vex him.² Kane’s application for an invalid pension in 1882 gives a snapshot of his waning health. A doctor affirmed that his war wounds had left him between 75 percent and 100 percent incapacitated “for obtaining his subsistence by manual labor.” Then sixty years old, Kane stood five feet four inches tall and weighed 122 pounds. He used glasses, though his right eye “soon tires.” Respiratory problems from the fractured sternum were the “most serious” of the disabilities, and his leg

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injury had left him with “some degree of lameness.” The physician concluded, “the general condition is bad, the man a physical wreck, and liable to sudden demise.”³ Despite his health problems, Kane’s physically arduous efforts to develop and promote McKean and Elk counties in northwestern Pennsylvania spanned the final twenty-five years of his life. After his arrival home from the Utah War in 1858, Kane plunged into work as a land agent for the McKean and Elk Land and Improvement Company. John Kane had helped found the company a few years earlier, and his heirs received a financial interest in it and lands in the region; even after his death, John thus exerted an enormous influence on his son’s life. Thomas and Elizabeth initially exulted in the opportunity. As company agent, Kane combined the roles of surveyor, salesman, civil engineer, geologist, and promoter, as he surveyed and sold land, found routes for roads and railroads, investigated natural resources, and recruited settlers. While the area was already renowned for its lumber, Kane pushed to expand its economic base by tapping into the region’s rich deposits of coal and oil.⁴ The Kanes initially planned to winter in Philadelphia and spend late spring, summer, and early fall in McKean County, a pattern they first implemented in 1856. However, in May 1859, Jane Kane sold Fern Rock, the Kanes’ Philadelphia mansion, depriving Thomas and Elizabeth of their winter home. Elizabeth, who had often chafed at living with the Kanes, wrote, “Tom of course feels the break up of the family much more than I do.” By contrast, she concluded with undisguised glee, “He is mine.” The Civil War, however, prevented the Kanes from immediately moving to McKean County; only after Kane’s resignation from the army in 1863 did the Kanes spend their first winter in the Alleghenies, in a converted barn far below their usual standards. Elizabeth viewed the sparsely populated Alleghenies as an eastern frontier. “To live in the West, how little I ever should have imagined such a thing possible five years ago,” she commented. Though generally satisfied, she sometimes complained of the rustic setting. Despite employing four servants in 1858, she wrote: “my bed remains unmade till noon often. Scarcely a day passes that there are not hair in the food.” Financial concerns also intruded on the Kanes’ peace of mind, as the “expense of the journey up to the mountains, the furnishing, transportation of goods, servants, and provision” stretched Thomas’s salary beyond the breaking point.⁵ While Elizabeth fretted about servants and finances, Thomas felt the lure of the Far West pulling him from the Alleghenies. An eastern frontier did not have the same appeal as the true West for him. During their first decade in the Alleghenies, Thomas concocted various grandiose schemes, driven by both his romantic fascination with the West and his sense that he was destined to distin-

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guish himself in larger arenas than the Pennsylvania backwoods. In November 1858, he suggested three options: purchase “coal lands” in British Columbia and “supply the Pacific Steamers”; move near San Bernardino, California, and “cultivate the vine”; or “colonise one of the Central American States with Mormons, and be Protector.” Surveying the possibilities, Elizabeth “refused all three.” The following year, Thomas complained that he “felt himself growing old, and in Elk County we should always be poor while if he lost his agency we should have nothing to live on.” In California, he asserted, “we should be almost sure to grow rich, at least enough, to leave our children independent.” A week later, Elizabeth sighed, “Tom is very anxious now to go to Mexico, where he thinks he could do very well.”⁶ Elizabeth, however, quickly came to appreciate the “humble Agency of the McKean Company”—believing that “God gave us this agency”—and she consistently squashed Kane’s romantic plans. She argued that the Alleghenies presented a “wide field of usefulness” for both of them. Among the advantages, Elizabeth noted that the cool mountain air and physical exercise improved the health of Thomas and the children. In addition, Thomas could “study Geology, and Engineering,” while she would assist him through copying and accounting. “Besides,” she declared, “we are very happy up there.” Reform opportunities also contributed to Elizabeth’s calculation, as her husband’s “occupation leads him into friendly relations with a host of poor people,” whom they could help through charity and inspire to live on a higher plane. She expressed satisfaction when Thomas temporarily gave up his schemes and buckled down to the tasks of land development and railroad promotion. Proudly noting that company officials were recognizing her husband’s “administrative talent, and are putting things more and more into his hands,” Elizabeth wrote, “I am delighted to see how practical my dear genius is.”⁷ After his return from the Civil War, however, Kane continued to thrash around with dreams (or delusions) of grandeur. In 1864, Elizabeth recorded that he wanted to sell their Pennsylvania lands and “be free—a desirable something for him—much less so for me.” He again suggested three options: moving to California, “becoming Military Governor” of East Tennessee, or settling in Canada “with the purpose of inciting a revolt, throwing off the English rule, and then picking out whatever place or occupation suited him best.” Elizabeth was not amused with the image of her husband—“a married man of forty the possessor of four small children”—provoking rebellions. While Thomas complained of the paltry results of their labor in the Alleghenies, Elizabeth countered: “He has maintained us, fought two years for his country, and if he sold now could move off owning $58,000 . . . and a half share in acres in the town of Lamont.” If they

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stayed, they would retain much greater amounts of land and interests in various coal and railroad companies. She insisted: “these lands are not paper. Really good coal underlies them, one real railroad at least runs through them, timber must have a market.” Elizabeth again won. Later that month, Thomas signaled his desire for permanence by paying one thousand dollars to change their town’s name from Lamont to Kane.⁸ As a full-time resident, Kane pushed the McKean and Elk Company to develop the region, rather than just wait for its lands to rise in value. In letters to company officials, he defended his own actions—opening roads, investigating the region’s coal, and resolving title disputes—but lambasted the company for inactivity. Local public opinion had begun to view the company as “an obstacle to general improvement,” since it had not actively sold its lands. As the local face of the company, Kane bore the brunt of unfavorable opinions, while the Board of Directors remained insulated in Philadelphia. Furthermore, Kane now understood life “without a Doctor, without a public road, without a Church,” a situation the company’s passivity had reinforced. To rectify the situation, he advised an advertising campaign and the construction of a hotel to spur publicity and draw residents.⁹ Frustrated when the Board of Directors ignored his pleas, Kane resigned as agent in June 1867. When surprised company officials urged his reconsideration, he obtained specific promises of action and negotiated a more lucrative position as “special agent.” He vented his displeasure at the company directors, arguing that while he had “subordinate[d] all my interests to theirs,” they had undervalued his work and delayed serious development of the region. Kane portrayed his decision as one of honor, writing that he could no longer “lend the Company my name” because its broken promises had sullied its reputation. Recognizing Kane’s value as its local representative, the board granted Kane a 5 percent commission on all land the company sold and agreed to give him funds to promote the region in eastern newspapers.¹⁰ Understanding that settlers followed publicity, Kane renewed his efforts to attract migrants to the region. Using methods he had honed in the service of reform, he planted articles in newspapers and cultivated relationships with editors (using company money and land to grease the wheels of his campaign). As a result, the New York Tribune lauded the region’s low prices, natural resources, and quality farmland and reported Kane’s desire to “establish a colony of enterprising, temperate, and progressive families.” Kane’s antipathy for Yankee culture shaped his recruitment activities, as he disdained New England settlers and sought Europeans, particularly Germans and Scandinavians. “‘A Yankee squeezes all he can get out of his location,’ and then ‘swaps it’ for a new piece,”

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he explained. By contrast, “a German makes it ‘Home’ and ‘coaxes Nature to do’ her best.” As such, Kane advertised in Europe, achieving notable success in convincing Swedes (who had a long history of immigration to Pennsylvania) to settle in McKean County. In addition, a “knot of Tom’s Bucktails” followed him to the area. In 1869, a reporter for the New York Herald wrote: “General Kane lives here in princely style. His thousands of acres of primeval forest and underlying and undeveloped coal veins lie all around him. He is monarch of all he surveys. He is the soul of refinement, and yields a powerful influence over the people of the neighborhood. It would almost seem that they were the retainers of a baron of ‘ye ancients day’ than the fellow citizens of a distinguished and enterprising landowner.” Kane projected an image of himself as a medieval baron, with aristocratic “refinement,” immense tracts of land, and devoted townspeople.¹¹ However, Kane’s attempts to create a temperance community betray this image of a benevolent baron and docile settlers. In the United States, temperance reform arose during the era of the Second Great Awakening, initially finding expression in the Benevolent Empire’s American Temperance Society. Kane’s opposition to evangelical reform and his sympathies with Irish Catholic immigrants (a favorite target of temperance crusaders) ensured his hostility, or at least indifference, to this early manifestation of temperance. Like most antebellum Democrats, he also probably saw temperance laws as infringing on personal liberty. During the 1840s, a working-class temperance organization known as the Washingtonians challenged the evangelical associations of the movement, but Kane stayed aloof. Temperance advocates, who had initially focused on moral persuasion, increasingly turned toward legal coercion; the 1850s marked the high point of the mid-nineteenth-century movement, as various states passed laws to control the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcohol. During the Civil War, a backlash against these laws occurred, though several states, including Pennsylvania, passed new restrictions in the immediate postwar years.¹² Kane became interested in temperance during this era, though he never explicitly referred to his motivations. Elizabeth doubtless influenced him; in her later years, she became a local leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, an organization of largely middle- and upper-class evangelical women dedicated to prohibition. Thomas’s conversion to Christianity likely made him more inclined to support a cause associated with evangelical reform. He may have also had personal motivations, as he witnessed his once-promising younger brother Pat descend into alcoholism, leading to professional stagnation and familial discord. Kane’s Republican politics may have caused him to look more favorably on temperance, as most antialcohol agitation came from within the Republican ranks. Voter suspicion of temperance laws, however, proved trouble-

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some for Republicans, who increasingly distanced themselves from the movement in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In addition, the use of suffering as a key argument for temperance crusaders, who depicted in literature and on the stage innocent women and children abused by alcoholic men, likely proved persuasive to him.¹³ Reformers connected alcohol to a myriad of social ills, arguing that it destroyed individuals and families, rankled the peace of communities, and increased crime and poverty. Social conditions in the Alleghenies confirmed such fears and solidified Kane’s embrace of temperance. The influx of Irish and Scottish laborers into the region for the construction of railroads and other enterprises in the 1860s disheartened the Kanes. According to Elizabeth, the “Wild Irish Diggers” used prodigious amounts of whiskey “to turn the brute into the demon.” “Life to peaceably-disposed persons,” she complained, “was by no means Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” As during the fugitive slave controversies, Kane took extralegal actions to implement his reform ideals, as he became a “Vigilance Committee of One, and decidedly enjoyed administering rough-and-ready justice.” Temperance vigilantism was not unknown in midnineteenth-century America, though women usually took the lead; during the 1850s and 1860s, women destroyed saloons and caches of alcohol throughout the North.¹⁴ Likewise, Kane’s vigilantism generally entailed the direct destruction of alcohol. For example, he and a trusted employee torched a nearby hut after they had removed everything except for large amounts of whiskey. On another occasion, still acting the part of a general, Kane drafted several former Bucktails into his war on alcohol. To discourage the growth of saloons on the town’s outskirts, he “detailed a squad of Bucktails” as night watchmen. The Bucktails, “themselves the worse for liquor,” went far beyond his instructions, ambushed and beat the “liquor-seller’s men,” and burned one of the shanties (possibly absconding with some money). As a consequence, Kane personally took the “saloon business” of the “most severely stamped upon” of the liquor men to another location “without bearing further malice.” Vigilantism was acceptable only within certain boundaries. While physical violence to people transgressed these norms, the threat of violence did not. Enterprising locals often hid their alcoholic activities from Kane’s watchful eyes in the woods. When Kane discovered one such “saloon,” he confronted the “party who were carousing” and “bade them mind their legs, as he was going to fire into the barrels. He held a revolver in each hand and when he did fire into the barrels the men quietly dispersed.” Intimidation was also directed against the Kanes, including a threat to murder one of their sons.¹⁵

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Kane also used the law and economic pressure to suppress alcohol. In his early years in the Alleghenies, he obtained a position as “Special Agent for the lands of the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad Company and Ridgway Estate that he might have the right to eject whiskey-sellers as trespassers over a large extent of country.” Although Kane successfully put “down all the liquor shops in the territory he controlled,” a “Whiskeytown” outside of the town “for a time threatened to outgrow Kane Proper.” He refused to “sell to Whiskeytowners,” who (according to Elizabeth) “felt degraded in their own eyes, and secretly esteemed the Kane-ites aristocratic, and lots there are now sold at a discount.” Kane’s power to enforce temperance, however, soon eroded; in 1867, the town, upon incorporation, abandoned the earlier restrictions. In 1878, though, the Kanes succeeded in passing a “more effective restriction” against alcohol. The ethos of temperance long remained, particularly because the laws attracted residents “of the temperance and moral kind.” Elizabeth’s obituary in 1909 noted, “To this day violation of the restrictions is regarded even by liquorites as a dangerous risk.”¹⁶ Besides his battles for temperance, Kane found the rift between himself and the McKean and Elk Company growing during the late 1860s. In an address he gave at Smethport, the McKean County seat, Kane allied himself with other settlers against absentee landlords, including his own company. He publicly revealed his resentment, asserting, “I work and work, and scheme and scheme, and spend and spend; and find that my strength and my means—my life—is given one tithe for my own, nine tenths for their benefit—whose strength is to sit still.” Kane rallied the local settlers to use the power of taxation against the nonresident landlords, whom he caricatured as “soaked with the Godless delights of Paris and whore worship of French fashions, French titles, French wines.” Despite his own genteel persona, Kane condemned the privileged landlords who exploited the region only for their own benefit. Devotion to the public good, he suggested, trumped his commitment to the company. Nevertheless, for the present, Kane argued that he could most benefit the region from within the company, by acting as the “barking dog at the heels of the heavy Pennsylvania teams I belong to.”¹⁷ Tensions between Kane and the company finally exploded in a burst of lawsuits in 1868. Elizabeth portrayed the relationship between Kane and the company as a “story on their part of five years of promises unperformed.” When Kane pressed for payment of his salary and fees, left unpaid for several years, “they put off and put off adjusting them until they were nearly as many thousands in our debt as we were worth.” Finally, the company offered to pay the Kanes in land. Already land-rich but cash-poor, they refused. Elizabeth explained the company’s machinations: “The principal Directors were also Bondholders who

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believed that the Company must become Bankrupt, and anticipated covetously the day when they might foreclose their Mortgage. They would have given Tom gladly a liberal slice of the cake, if he would have eaten it and held his tongue. They were foiled by his acting as Agent for the Stockholders, defending them and their interests.” Guided by his sense of moral purpose and exasperated by the company’s declaration of bankruptcy, Kane sued in both McKean County and Philadelphia. His retention of the respected Philadelphia lawyer Eli K. Price “was sore discouragement to ‘the Board.’” In addition, when the company’s lawyer went to Smethport, he was resoundingly rebuffed by the locals while Kane was treated as a local hero. The lawyer reported back that Kane’s lawsuit could never be allowed to go before a jury in McKean County. “The Company were whipped,” Elizabeth exulted, “and the suit was settled amicably to Tom’s satisfaction.” The settlement included various lands, an interest in a mining company valued at forty thousand dollars, and an additional fifteen thousand dollars in company bonds.¹⁸ As he disentangled himself from the McKean and Elk Company, Kane once again searched for new horizons. He first thought of joining an Arctic expedition or obtaining a position as governor of Alaska, recently purchased from Russia. Ever since his brother Elisha’s death in 1857, Kane had spent time “poring over books on the Arctic Regions.” Elizabeth had long feared that her husband “desired to go there” to validate Elisha’s scientific theories, including the existence of an open polar sea, and to erase the sordid memory of his brother’s relationship with Margaret Fox. Furthermore, Kane felt constrained by the limited possibilities in the Alleghenies. He despaired to Elizabeth, “this is a poor country,” and she feared that she, by “pinning him down here,” would “make him waste his life on trivial work.” She fretted, “I keep Tom penned up here, when perhaps he ought to be distinguishing himself.” Nevertheless, when Thomas spoke of an Arctic expedition, Elizabeth recognized it as “too wild a scheme, so dismal a prospect,” and she “struggled against it long.”¹⁹ In 1868, Kane illustrated his plans for Alaska and the Arctic in a lecture, later published as a pamphlet, before the American Geographical Society in New York City. Alaska could serve as a “base of Circumpolar Exploration,” and Kane himself envisioned directing, with the help of the society, a land expedition from Alaska to the Arctic. Uniting scientific goals with reform aspirations, Kane had found another downtrodden group worthy of his defense, promising to “bring in a good word for the aborigines, whom our people, I observe, are beginning to butcher and poison in Alaska as elsewhere.” (Horace Greeley described Kane, who had some contact with Native Americans in the Alleghenies and in his journeys to assist the Mormons, as a “veteran in the service of Humanity with regard

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to the Red Men.”) In his lecture, Kane boasted, “Who has ever had the credit of managing Indians better than myself? I think I know how to use Friend Savage.” The lecture’s reception pleased Kane, as “all the newspapers gave full reports and complimentary notices.” Though Kane made some efforts to be appointed the first American governor of Alaska, he soon gave up that quest.²⁰ Nevertheless, Kane kept his interest in Arctic exploration. In 1869, the return of Charles Francis Hall—an explorer inspired by Elisha’s voyages who had spent the previous five years in the Arctic—created a renewed frenzy of interest in the Arctic. Fueled by Hall’s popular lectures, pressure for a government-funded expedition mounted, leading Congress to approve one in July 1870. Captain Carlile Pollock Patterson, an employee and future superintendent of the Coast Survey, telegraphed Kane after the bill’s passage: “Come on here to act in regard to Arctic expedition. It is of vital importance that you be the directive power.” Elizabeth thought her husband “has a great horror of growing old” and interpreted his interest as a midlife crisis, so that he could “die out of my sight, and that then I will remember him as the ideal hero who won my child’s heart, and not see him grow old and gray.” Thomas promised her that he would “return rich, and entitled to take a first place in Pennsylvania politics.” Declaring his intention to obtain the position, he blamed her for the “childish prejudices” that had prevented them from “going West long ago.” Soon after, however, Hall received the command, and Kane had “sincere grief in relinquishing it and settling down to these narrow ways.”²¹ In 1869, Kane also pursued gubernatorial posts in Washington and Utah. The Kanes had revived their plan for Elizabeth to become an author, and Thomas argued that a territorial position for himself would give her a “name” and launch her career. Although she opposed his other plans to move West, Elizabeth reluctantly allowed him to seek these posts. In April, Thomas traveled to Washington, D.C., to seek the Washington territorial position, but he acted too slowly. While there, however, he heard rumors that Utah governor Charles Durkee, whom he had known as a Free Soiler, would soon be replaced by a “very unfit and unworthy person.” When he telegraphed to ask Elizabeth permission to pursue the appointment, she lamented that it made her “very sad”: “He cannot be contented here, and I must bid farewell to hopes of a happy life. Tom is not made to be happy but to dwell on cold and naked cliffs. He would make a Xavier or Loyola or a Pascal, and I am utterly commonplace. I don’t feel, when I come to realities the least particle of a call to go to Utah or anywhere else.” Nevertheless, she granted permission, resolving: “I will not have to endure seeing him die of discontent because I have chained him to my side here. I cannot pretend to share the elevation of his soul, but I do love him.” Thomas was “terribly disap-

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pointed” when he realized he would not receive the nomination. A few months later, Durkee offered to “willingly resign” for him. Elizabeth now wanted the post, accepting her husband’s earlier arguments that a position as a governor’s wife would enable her to “be of service to my sex as a writer upon the great question of Woman’s Rights.”²² Thomas, however, made no additional effort to obtain the Utah position, opting instead to become the first president of the Pennsylvania Board of State Charities, a committee designed to increase government oversight over reforming institutions. Contemporary observers often complained of the chaotic administration of charitable establishments—including prisons, orphanages, mental hospitals, houses of refuge, and homes for disabled soldiers and sailors—which were usually supported by a mixture of private donations and government funds. Using unnecessary suffering as the key criterion, reformers lamented the deplorable conditions of many institutions, charging they were inadequately funded and administered by incompetent and often corrupt officials (who commonly received their positions as a result of patronage politics). In response, many states founded boards of state charities in the 1860s and 1870s, beginning in Massachusetts in 1863, which served as the roots for modern state welfare agencies. Though most often advocated by the reform wing of the Republican Party, the boards generally received bipartisan approval. Supporters argued that states had the responsibility to inspect and oversee institutions to ensure they met minimal standards of care, used public funds wisely, and battled corruption. Although the powers of the commissions were largely limited to investigation and advice, contemporaries saw the Board of Charity as “a bold instrument of reform, one capable of reaching all the way down to the root causes of dependency.” Furthermore, reflecting the rising ethos of the early Progressive Era, the reformers sought to rationalize, centralize, and professionalize the states’ welfare structures.²³ Though the boards initially contained mostly members, like Kane, drawn from the ranks of antebellum reformers, they ironically paved the way for the marginalization of these amateur gentlemen reformers. In Massachusetts, for example, the two guiding spirits were Samuel Gridley Howe and Franklin B. Sanborn, who had both been deeply involved in a wide range of antebellum reforms. Like Kane, they “defied” what would become “the prime imperative of the late nineteenth century: specialize.” The Massachusetts board created the American Social Science Association as an appendage to it; this organization eventually spawned more specialized organizations, such as the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association. By the turn of the twentieth century, these societies had contributed to a larger cultural trend that

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exalted the specialist, the expert, the professional, over reformers who dabbled in many areas. In part, this resulted from a reconceptualization of causation, in which the direct linkages between events often drawn by reformers of Kane’s generation were increasingly seen as inadequate. A younger generation of social scientists saw an interdependent world, in which causation seemed more contingent, obscure, and distant; as a consequence, knowledge increasingly became the province of experts. In this new world, there would be little place for someone like Kane, whose interests included everything from ethnology to civil engineering to educational reform.²⁴ Kane lobbied the state legislature for the board’s creation in 1869, knowing that Governor John Geary (his commanding officer at Gettysburg) would appoint him to it. Although he would not receive financial remuneration, Kane thought the position would increase his reputation, jump-start Elizabeth’s writing career, and “enable him to do a great deal of good.” Elizabeth also looked forward to the work: “He promises to take me with him. I think he esteems my mind more highly than he should, but if I can do any good by writing I would be so glad.” While Elizabeth worried about Thomas’s time away from paid employment, she recognized that he had “no lucrative employment open to him now” and could not “be happy without being usefully employed.” “Moreover,” she concluded, “it does seem as if it was a God-given piece of work.”²⁵ The legislative act called for five commissioners with staggered terms of up to five years, as well as a general agent and a secretary. Kane received the five-year appointment and was unanimously elected president. The legislature charged the board with making annual investigative visits to “all charitable and correctional institutions in the State” and to prepare an annual report discussing “the causes and best treatment of pauperism, crime, disease and insanity.” Partisan wrangling, however, threatened to sink the board’s work before it began. In making appointments to the board, Geary and Republican senators, who narrowly controlled the Pennsylvania Senate, ignored a “bargain” they had made before the law’s passage that “two Democrats should be made members.” Democrats thus threatened to block confirmation of the nominees. Declaring that Republicans should honor their agreement, Kane offered his resignation. However, William A. Wallace, the “leading” Senate Democrat, told Kane: “General, you were to be unanimously confirmed. If you withdraw, we will repeal the Act.” Kane, who felt “that a great trust is confided to him,” consented to remain and the crisis passed.²⁶ Kane attended to his duties throughout 1870 and 1871. In November 1870, for instance, he went to the “opening of the State Lunatic Asylum,” then traveled to Harrisburg to deliver the board’s annual report to the legislature before visiting

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“various institutions.” The board’s 1871 report echoed many of the themes that had been central to Kane’s reform career, including “Benevolence in Punishment and in Provision for the Poor” and education of impoverished children. The report repeatedly distinguished between liberty and licentiousness to rebut arguments that reforms would encroach on personal freedoms. For Kane, whose career had been animated by the concept of “liberty,” the experience illustrated his continuing transition—evident as well in his approach to infant education and temperance—toward a greater acceptance of government regulation. Though still suspicious of centralized power—he complained that the legislative act creating the board granted powers “too great . . . to be lodged in unreliable hands”—he nevertheless shifted his view of the appropriate balance between liberty and order. Indeed, the boards of state charities contributed to the weakening of the cultural dominance of the “individualistic tenets of classical liberalism,” the reigning assumption of most nineteenth-century reformers.²⁷ Kane’s unwillingness to compromise led to his abrupt resignation from the board in 1871. Accusing his fellow board members of not undertaking their duties “with sufficient thoroughness,” Kane lectured them on the need to “avoid ‘whitewashing,’ and to give the Legislature candid and reliable information without fear or favor.” Hoping to “effect radical good,” he “laid his own views before the Legislature, as he could not carry his Board with him.” Pennsylvania senator Simon Cameron admonished Kane about the public dispute: “the whole state suffers,” he wrote, when leading citizens “are unable to act together on public affairs.” Unconvinced, Kane resigned and issued a “rather scathing report” that lambasted his fellow board members and “recommended the abolition of the board as an inefficient means for the purpose in view.”²⁸ Besides his involvement in state politics, Kane’s political peregrinations within the national parties continued during the postbellum period. A moderate Republican in the immediate postwar years, Kane advocated civil rights for freed slaves (Elizabeth described herself and her husband as “Black Republicans”) but also desired a rapid reunion with the South. In 1869, Kane thrust himself into national politics, characteristically combining an ambitious goal with behindthe-scenes action. The Reconstruction agenda of Radical Republicans, which aimed to reform the South by empowering freed slaves politically and economically, threatened to split the party. Hoping to avoid a division, Kane envisioned brokering an agreement over Reconstruction policy among President Ulysses S. Grant, powerful senator Simon Cameron, and Maryland editor and party elder Francis P. Blair. Grant, who ran in 1868 under the slogan “Let Us Have Peace,” had angered many of his moderate supporters such as Kane by accepting most of the Radicals’ proposals. Cameron, a Pennsylvania Democrat during the antebel-

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lum era who became a Republican and served as Lincoln’s first secretary of war, affiliated with the Radical Republicans. Though a generation older than Kane, Blair had passed through a similar political trajectory, from Jacksonian Democrat to Free Soiler to antislavery Democrat to Republican. A confidant of Lincoln, Blair and his son Francis P. Blair Jr. (the Democratic vice presidential candidate in 1868) had left the Republican Party over Reconstruction, arguing for southern clemency, states’ rights, and white supremacy. Kane’s own approach fell between the extremes represented by Cameron and Blair.²⁹ A visit to Washington, D.C., in April 1869 sparked Kane’s quixotic plan to reconcile the disparate factions of the Republican coalition. While there, Kane was invited to the White House by John W. Forney, a newspaper editor and influential Republican whom Kane, over his father’s protest, had allowed to stay in the Kane family home in the early 1850s to help save him from alcoholism. At the White House, Grant, who had an affinity for Union generals, “requested an invitation to visit” Kane in the Alleghenies that summer. Kane thus saw his opportunity to form an alliance among Grant, Cameron, and Blair. The elderly Blair, however, declined his invitation, sinking Kane’s hopes to mediate an agreement on Reconstruction politics. Kane turned instead to improving the rocky relationship between Grant and Cameron, who had squabbled over patronage matters. According to Elizabeth, Kane “knew how important it was for Grant to conciliate Pennsylvania, and how impossible it was for him to do so without Cameron’s friendship.” With Kane’s assistance, Cameron would have the “power to exert a commanding influence at Washington,” which he would hopefully yield “in matters of national interest rather than patronage.”³⁰ Accompanied by his wife, sister and brother-in-law, a daughter, two servants, and a reporter from the New York Herald, Grant arrived in the town of Kane for a four-day visit on August 14, 1869. Cameron soon joined them as well. The prospect of a presidential visit had initially terrified Elizabeth: “when I came to think of my deficiencies as a housekeeper, my ignorance of ‘polite society,’ my forest bred children . . . the fear predominated that we should discredit and mortify Tom.” The Kanes had anxiously prepared for their guests. They concluded to “make no attempt at display; no white gloved waitress, nor elaborate dinners,” though Thomas (allowing hospitality to trump temperance) “provided the best wines New York could supply.” During the visit, Thomas embarrassed Elizabeth, rather than vice versa. She wrote: “Tom would talk radicalism as if on purpose to provoke me. . . . Knowing that the world called him ‘eccentric,’ and seeing that I wished him to prove the world mistaken, he talked paradoxes until Grant looked puzzled.” Kane told his frustrated wife, “It is well I am not a candidate for office, for I should have destroyed all my chances of success.”³¹

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Besides engaging in political discussions, the presidential party attended church, went fishing, and held a reception for the local citizens. Elizabeth noted with pleasure that Grant attended a Methodist service rather than accept an invitation from a local Catholic church; unlike Thomas, who publicly befriended Catholics, Elizabeth was “heathen enough to rejoice in his [Grant’s] antipathy for our Romanist fellow Christians.” The group’s fishing excursion provoked a minor controversy. The previous year, the Pennsylvania legislature had outlawed trout fishing during August, a fact that Kane, not wishing to ruin Grant’s fishing trip, failed to disclose. Kane told a local newspaper, “I said to myself as I did when I was younger of the Fugitive Slave Law, ‘Break the law, but break it openly and pay the penalty.’” Elizabeth reported the consequences: “Every Democratic paper throughout the length and breadth of the State howled over that handful of tiny fish.” Kane then “allowed it to be known through our Republican papers” that he had kept the president “in ignorance,” and he paid the sixty-dollar fine. After the fishing, the citizens of Kane eagerly lined up to shake the hand of Grant, who greeted them in Kane’s “big Lafayette chair” (which Lafayette himself had used “at his reception in Independence Hall” in 1824). While the visit did not influence Reconstruction policy, it gave Grant and Cameron an opportunity to forge a personal bond, which allowed Cameron, who had initially been marginalized by Grant’s dismissive treatment, to become an “authoritative figure” in Grant’s administration. The Kanes believed their actions saved the president from losing the critical support of Cameron’s numerous supporters in Pennsylvania.³² Kane’s relationship with Grant, which varied between reluctant rejection and enthusiastic support, shaped his politics until the end of his life. In 1872, he joined the Liberal Republican movement, an eclectic coalition of Republicans disappointed with Grant’s first term. Liberal Republicans complained of the scandals that plagued Grant’s administration, charged that Radical Republicans (with Grant’s support) had pursued a vindictive policy against the South, and opposed the protective tariff Grant and the Radicals advocated. Kane characterized his dissent from the mainstream Republican Party as “unspeakably painful” to Senator Cameron and explained to Grant that the scandals had led to his disaffection. Though he had “unimpaired personal respect” for the president, Kane told him, “My action is my protest against the influence of Money.”³³ The corruption of Grant’s first term led influential intellectuals, who distrusted the masses and believed in government by society’s “best men,” to make civil service reform a key element of the Liberal Republican agenda. These genteel reformers (including luminaries such as Missouri senator Carl Schurz, intellectual Charles Eliot Norton, and editor of the Nation E. L. Godkin)

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viewed themselves as standing “above social divisions as disinterested spokesmen for the common good.” In their eyes, civil service reform—which promised to replace corruption with competence, politicians with gentlemen, cronies with experts—would empower society’s “natural leaders” and reform government. Though a former Democrat who easily reached for the rhetoric of egalitarianism, Kane had sympathies with this viewpoint, supported civil service reform, and saw himself as one of the “best men” who should govern. Elizabeth perceptively explained this apparent paradox: “Tom believes that Vox Populi is Vox Dei, but then he is king of the county and the popular voice clamors as his finger points. . . . He is with the populace as a guiding spirit, and associates with them as a noble might, secure in his own position.” In addition, he believed in political, not social, egalitarianism; as Elizabeth noted, Thomas would not “have our children feel a genuine equality with our fellow-citizen’s children.”³⁴ Kane’s political roots in the Democratic Party and in Free Soil also influenced his involvement in Liberal Republicanism. Though a diverse movement, the Liberal Republicans attracted especially large numbers of former Democrats and Free Soilers, many of whom had been influential in the founding of the Republican Party they now sought to reform. One former Free Soiler stated that at the Liberal Republicans’ national convention in 1872, “I was delighted to meet troops of the old Free Soilers of 1848 and 1852.” One historian has characterized the movement as primarily “an expression of the former Democrats’ estrangement from the Republican party.” Having traveled along with Kane through Free Soil into the Republican Party, these former Democrats saw the “triumph of Whigs and Whig ideas” (particularly on economic issues) in the Republican Party. In response, they dusted off the economic policies and rhetoric of the Jacksonian era, which drew on classical liberalism to reject protective tariffs, concentration of economic power, and government involvement in the economy. These views likely attracted Kane, the former Jacksonian who had supported free-trade policies since the 1840s.³⁵ Kane’s support of lenient terms for reconciliation with the South also played a key role in his decision to join the Liberal Republicans. Amnesty for former Confederates, particularly those “best men” capable of leadership, emerged as a central theme that could hold together the disparate coalition. Amnesty proved persuasive to Kane, whose wartime experiences led him to disparage poor southern whites and respect his genteel adversaries among the Confederate officers. Kane’s desire to keep the planter class in power may have partially resulted from his desire to prevent a repeat of the social chaos and racial mixing he had seen in the West Indies following emancipation there. Like the Liberal Republicans’ presidential nominee, his friend Horace Greeley, Kane advocated “Universal

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Amnesty and Impartial Suffrage” for the South, meaning the reintegration of former Confederates into the political system as well as assurance of civil rights for former slaves. Influenced by their pacifist inclinations and their desire for rapid sectional reunion, Kane and Greeley both tried to mend relations between North and South throughout the Civil War era. Kane supported southern Democrats in the election of 1860, viewed the war as the best path to peace, and reached out to Confederates after the war. Greeley had sought sectional reconciliation during the secession crisis of 1860–61, at an ill-fated conference with Confederate leaders in 1864, and as the personal guarantor of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s bail in 1867.³⁶ Many prominent antebellum abolitionists, such as Kane’s acquaintances Salmon Chase and Charles Sumner, accepted this reconciliationist logic, which was particularly persuasive to former antislavery Democrats. Nevertheless, most former abolitionists condemned their actions as shortsighted and as a “surrender of the nation’s obligation to the freedmen.” Even as violence against blacks in the South increased, Liberal Republicans responded that restoration of local rule and the guarantee of political rights for former slaves constituted the best policy for both whites and blacks.³⁷ Finally, Kane connected his support of the Liberal Republicans with Grant’s attempts to break Mormon control of Utah (discussed in the next chapter). According to Apostle George Q. Cannon, Grant had given Kane an “ultimatum upon our affairs,” which caused him to “throw himself into the Liberal Republican movement.” Even if the party failed, Kane argued, “the effect will be to intimidate the Administration, and call the attention of the country to the principles of the Constitution.”³⁸ Since Radical Republicans had pursued Reconstruction-style policies in both the South and Utah, Kane apparently believed that the defeat of Reconstruction would halt federal interference in Utah. On this, he miscalculated badly; the end of Reconstruction in 1877 only refocused the nation’s attention on its unfinished business with the Mormons. At the Liberal Republican national convention at Cincinnati in May 1872, Kane presided over the Pennsylvania delegation and worked for Greeley’s nomination. Cannon, who attended on Kane’s instructions, found him looking “very badly, being evidently overworked,” as he had “organized in his State a heavy opposition” to Grant. Probably overestimating Kane’s influence, Cannon credited his efforts with ensuring the nomination of the dark horse Greeley from among the various contenders: “it was through his management that Greeley got the majority of votes.” The Democratic Party soon united the opposition to Grant by nominating Greeley as well. On Greeley’s request, Kane ran for Congress on the Liberal Republican ticket. Kane, who had always felt both at-

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tracted to and repelled by political office, accepted the offer only because he had the “certainty of being defeated” in his heavily Republican district. He also “stumped the State” for Greeley. However, the coalition of Liberal Republicans and Democrats met with ignominious defeat; Grant received more than 55 percent of the vote, the largest of any president between 1836 and 1892. A dejected Greeley soon died. In his congressional race, Kane lost, though he carried his “own and the neighboring counties where he is known.”³⁹ The Liberal Republican movement soon withered away. Many of the former Republicans continued their protest by joining the Democratic Party, while others like Kane returned to the mainstream Republican Party. Kane’s final political actions involved ardent support of the president he had rejected in 1872. He wrote to Grant’s private secretary in 1874, “It is the purpose of General Grant’s friends,—at the appropriate moment—to invite him to accept another term of office.” Grant firmly refused the entreaties of Kane and others to run for a third term in 1876.⁴⁰ Following the end of his presidency, however, Grant kept himself in the public eye through a world tour from May 1877 to December 1879. Received as a hero abroad, accounts of his travels kept his name in the papers at home. Since President Rutherford B. Hayes, a Republican, had pledged to serve only one term, speculation mounted that Grant would again run for the presidency in 1880. In January 1880, a local newspaper reported that Kane had declared his support “for Grant first, last and all the time.” Kane assured the suspicious editor that, during a third term, Grant “would be free from political combinations and could afford to be President of the whole people.” Though he disagreed with Kane’s assessment, the editor noted, “Gen. Kane is a good talker; he speaks with deliberation, and yet at times with great vehemence. . . . His conversation is allegorical to a great extent, and is most charming to listen to.”⁴¹ Kane also agitated for Grant’s nomination at the state and national levels. In February 1880, the Pennsylvania delegation to the Republican convention (including Kane) decided to require all state delegates to vote as a unit for Grant. At the convention at Chicago in May, Grant led through the first thirty-five ballots but consistently fell short of a majority. On the thirty-sixth ballot, the anti-Grant coalition, which had hitherto split its votes among several candidates, finally united behind James Garfield. As delegates stampeded toward Garfield, New York senator Roscoe Conkling, in charge of the Grant forces, encouraged the delegates: “Keep steady, boys. Grant is going to win on this ballot.” According to an obituary, Kane also “sprang on a chair and shouted, ‘Be steady, men.’” While all of Grant’s delegates held firm, Garfield garnered 399 votes to Grant’s 306. The defeated 306 delegates, devoted to Grant through thirty-six ballots, im-

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mediately found a place in political mythology, celebrated in print and honored by commemorative medals. The day before his death three years later, Kane claimed a central role, telling his son Elisha: “I nominated Grant. That was in New York—Write that down.” While the dying Kane misplaced the convention site, his emphasis on the event during his final hours suggests its personal importance. For a final time, Kane must have told himself, he had resolutely stood in the minority for a righteous cause.⁴² Financial setbacks and successes generally overshadowed Kane’s political defeats during his final decade. Freed from his troublesome relationship with the McKean and Elk Company, Kane felt the lure of the Far West less in the 1870s. He finished construction of the hotel and operated it to give McKean County a “good reputation as a summer retreat.” Kane also indefatigably promoted railroads, as he had since the 1850s, to increase the value of his lands, draw additional settlers, and make the mining of coal viable. His personal and business relationship with Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a powerful railroad baron, proved crucial to his efforts. Even so, financial stability eluded the Kanes. During a visit to Utah in 1872–73, tragedy struck when someone stole one of the Kanes’ checks from the mail, “forged an endorsement, drew out all their money and created a large bank over draft.” The Panic of 1873 compounded their misery by rendering “their railroad and coal lands unmarketable, and left them without income.” Elizabeth pawned her silver to pay debts.⁴³ In the late 1870s, wealth (in money as well as land) finally came to the Kanes with the discovery of oil and natural gas in the region nearby. The discovery, Elizabeth wrote, validated her husband’s previous claims, “quickened settlement, and brought new industries into the region; and in spite of himself, almost, he found himself growing rich.” In the early 1880s, Kane organized the New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad and Coal Company (with his son Elisha, a graduate from Princeton in civil engineering, as president) to construct a line connecting McKean County with Buffalo, New York, about eighty miles to the north. By so doing, the rich natural resources of the Alleghenies—especially coal, oil, and natural gas—could find a ready market in Buffalo’s booming industrial economy (and, via Buffalo’s port, in other industrializing cities). A gorge over Kinzua Creek—2,053 feet wide and 301 feet deep—obstructed the route. Undaunted, in 1882, Kane hired a civil engineer and a construction crew that built the Kinzua Viaduct, at the time the highest railroad bridge in the world. Promoted as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the viaduct attracted trains of sightseers from Buffalo and Pittsburgh.⁴⁴ Reflecting on the growth of Kane, Pennsylvania, must have proved deeply satisfying for Kane in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Through his vision and labors

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FIGURE 14. The Kinzua Viaduct in 1883. (Reproduced by permission, © Planet Smethport Project, http://www.smethporthistory.org.)

(and the sacrifice of his romantic plans for the West), the remote village had become a bustling town, thriving in the midst of an economic boom. As the guiding spirit of the enterprise, Kane had personally recruited the settlers, promoted the region in the eastern press and in Europe, supervised construction of the hotel, and obtained contracts for railroads. Even so, Elizabeth’s 1869 triumphalism regarding the Kanes’ work in reform had proved shortsighted. Certainly, they had experienced victories—the end of slavery, local restrictions on alcohol,

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the advancement of female doctors. Nevertheless, the Board of Charities, which initially seemed so promising, proved a disappointment, and the movement it represented would eventually make amateur reformers like Kane increasingly irrelevant. The Kanes’ fight for temperance, despite their concerted efforts and Thomas’s vigilantism, produced mixed results. The end of Reconstruction, for which Kane had agitated, condemned southern blacks to the miseries of Jim Crow and delayed the advance of a more radical vision of equality in racial relations far into the future. And Utah, despite Elizabeth’s assertion, was far from “powerful.”

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Anti-Anti-Polygamy

As the nation remounted its crusade against Mormon polygamy and theocracy in the 1870s and 1880s, Kane again stood as the foremost defender of and adviser to the embattled Saints. As the national campaign against Mormonism accelerated, Kane worked repeatedly to block anti-polygamy legislation in Congress. Along with his wife, he traveled to Utah during the winter of 1872–73, a visit that led Elizabeth, long suspicious of the Saints, to defend Mormon women in a perceptive book, Twelve Mormon Homes. In addition, Kane’s advice encouraged Brigham Young to disentangle himself economically from the church, spurred plans for Mormon colonization of Mexico, and influenced Latter-day Saint education and communitarian practices. Kane blamed evangelical reformers for the crusade against the Mormons, which ensured that an anti-evangelical impulse—notwithstanding his embrace of temperance and his religious conversions—remained central to his reform philosophy. His persistent defense of the Saints allowed Kane to continue to see himself as a romantic reformer who heroically stood against the opinion of the nation to preserve the liberty of an oppressed people. His influence on the Saints and the direction of their history only grew with time. The decade following the Utah War marked the most quiescent period in Kane’s relationship with the Mormons, the result of both a relative calm in tensions between the Saints and the nation and his preoccupation with the Civil War and the development of his community. Nevertheless, the Saints retained some contact with him. During the Civil War, Brigham Young kept up a sporadic correspondence with Kane, and John Bernhisel, George Q. Cannon, and Brigham Young Jr. visited him. Kane even unsuccessfully tried to persuade Brig-

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ham Jr. to join his army staff. Kane depended on a “friend in the cabinet”—most likely his antislavery acquaintance Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury— to advise him of any threats to “Utah interests.” However, the cabinet member failed to follow through, as Kane expressed surprise when in June 1863 Mormon T. B. H. Stenhouse gave him a negative account of the relationship between the Saints and federal troops stationed in Salt Lake City. Kane reassured Stenhouse by remarking, “it is singularly providential, that all my enemies on Utah affairs have come to either an untimely or disgraceful end.” In 1864, the Utah congressional delegate—John F. Kinney, a former Utah chief justice and a sympathetic outsider like Kane—introduced a bill for statehood. Young informed Kane that the Saints were not “particularly anxious about statehood” if Kane could be appointed governor. Furthermore, Young again invited him to “embrace the Gospel,” expressing confidence he would “do so in the Spirit world, if you do not in this time.”¹ Kane had little contact with the Mormons for the rest of the 1860s; however, lack of communication did not diminish his ardor for the Saints. After visiting him in 1869, Brigham Jr. reported to his father that Kane’s faith was “unshaken that your policy will triumph over all hell and the Government.”² Though Young and Kane exchanged regular letters from 1869 until Young’s death in 1877, the nature of their correspondence changed. In the 1850s, they had sent long, full letters. Now, concerned for the privacy of their exchanges, they often wrote brief notes, many times only to arrange a visit between Kane and a Mormon emissary, generally Cannon or one of Young’s trusted sons, Brigham Jr. or John Willard Young. To further guarantee secure communications, they sometimes sent coded letters. In late 1869, Kane saw an opportunity for Utah statehood in the heated political atmosphere of Reconstruction. Earlier that year, the Fifteenth Amendment, which banned voting restrictions based on race, passed Congress, but it had not yet been approved by the necessary number of states. Kane suggested that Radical Republicans in the Senate, the most rabid foes of Mormonism, were willing “to go [to] all lengths” to secure the amendment’s ratification and would possibly admit Utah in exchange for its support of the amendment and a protective tariff. Feeling “pretty sanguine” that this unorthodox alliance would succeed, Kane instructed the Saints, according to Brigham Jr., to “put forth our power and exert ourselves to accomplish our emancipation.” Utah statehood, Kane told Brigham Jr., would be the sealing accomplishment of his own life: “when your Territory is made a state then I am ready to die but first I must come and see you.” Brigham Young readily acquiesced to the conditions, and Utah represen-

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tative William Hooper carried a statehood petition to Congress. Kane, however, miscalculated, and the petition went nowhere.³ Kane and the Saints had more success in blocking efforts by Radical Republicans to pass anti-polygamy legislation. After the failure of an extreme measure to deprive Mormons of control of Utah in 1867, Illinois congressman Shelby M. Cullom submitted a more moderate bill in late 1869, proposing to strengthen federal judicial officials in Utah, shift polygamy cases to federal courts, and compel plural wives to testify against their husbands. In response, Mormon women took center stage to combat the common portrayal of them (in Eliza Snow’s words) as “stupid, degraded, heart-broken beings” in need of protection from the federal government. Five thousand women, for instance, crowded the Salt Lake Tabernacle for an “indignation meeting” against the legislation. The Utah legislature enfranchised women in 1870, making Utah the second territory or state (after Wyoming) to give women the vote and drawing eastern suffrage organizations into an uneasy alliance with the Saints. If the Cullom legislation passed the House, Kane boasted, “I can kill the Bill in the Senate.” His interventions with President Grant and several senators “greatly relieved” his mind, and the bill eventually failed.⁴ Appreciative of Kane’s efforts, Young tried to bring him further into the Mormon orbit. In February 1870, he proposed that Kane help him negotiate a business loan for one hundred thousand dollars to fund the construction of Utah railroads. Elizabeth wrote that Young’s offer “would have relieved us of all our pecuniary embarrassments.” Nevertheless, Kane refused to “have money dealings with the Mormons” and chastised Young for paying more attention to “making, buying, or selling railroads” than obtaining statehood. In their “too eager pursuit of riches,” he lectured, the Saints would “forget wherein resides the true strength of a great people.”⁵ That fall, Elizabeth recorded in her journal a second intriguing effort by Young to further connect Kane with Mormonism. She wrote, “Brigham Young’s son John W. left us yesterday bearing back with him Tom’s refusal to succeed Young.” She felt conflicted about the decision: Tom is a born leader of men, and might perhaps have again saved this people, bringing them back from their errors. I grieve for them, so soon to be as sheep without a shepherd, and feel sorry for the old man [Young] who will be seventy next spring, and who feels like Josiah that peace only remains with the people until his death. I think he would be glad to believe that Tom would unwind the tangled skein he leaves, and lead his people back to the trodden ways.

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There is a germ of truth in their protest against the sins of our modern life and I hope it will bear fruit while the errors die.

At the time, Young held no political office and had already divested himself of many of his business positions. Elizabeth’s words suggest an offer of ecclesiastical office. No other document, however, indicates that Young considered Kane as a possible successor to his ecclesiastical positions, a notion that seems implausible. Whatever the case, Kane opted to preserve the status quo in his relationship with the Saints.⁶ Although he refused Young’s offers, Kane fervently defended the Saints as threats against Mormonism increased during the 1870s. Mining prospects and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 spurred the growth of a local non-Mormon population. To break Mormon political hegemony, President Grant appointed a slate of more combative federal officials and Utah nonMormons founded a political party, the Liberal Party, in 1870. The Saints responded by forming their own political party, the People’s Party, which heavily outpolled the Liberals. The demographic trend and the new political context thrust the Mormon Question, after a decade hiatus, back onto the national agenda. The first battles of the reignited war took place in Utah’s federal courtrooms. New chief justice James B. McKean, a devout Methodist inspired by evangelical reform’s hostility to Mormonism, moved to weaken the Mormondominated probate courts and strengthen the powers of federal judicial officials. He also targeted polygamists for prosecution and barred all believers in polygamy from serving on grand juries.⁷ Young rightly perceived that his imprisonment would become the prime objective of McKean’s crusade. In April 1871, Young railed against the judge’s “tyrannical and high handed measures” and asked Kane to work for a replacement. That September, Young’s son John hurried east with a letter to Kane notifying him that the “‘Ring’ of Judicial and other federal officers” had successfully brought charges against Young. Even before Kane received his letter, Young expected to be a “prisoner in the Military Post.” Indeed, in early October 1871, a grand jury impaneled by McKean charged Young, Cannon, and other Mormon leaders with bigamy, lewd and lascivious cohabitation, and adultery. McKean made clear the broader significance of Young’s prosecution, declaring, “the case at bar is called The People v. Brigham Young, its other and real title is ‘Federal Authority versus Polygamic Theocracy.’” In response, Young pledged to “fight them in a legal way” and asked Kane either to travel to Utah to assist him or to lobby in Washington to “influence the Policy which makes war upon us all the time, or in obtaining the removal of these judges who are a unit against us.”⁸

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Kane advised a different strategy, suggesting Young “retain the best legal counsel in the United States without regard to expense” and go into hiding along with other prominent Saints. The previous year, Kane had promised Young personal protection for such a scenario: “at any and all times my house is open to you. . . . My men around are in great part my old followers, and as far as this world goes, are devoted to me.” Furthermore, his influence with Pennsylvania governor Geary would protect Young from extradition requests “long enough” to allow Kane “to make any new arrangements called for without flurry.” As a “political offender” and an “object of religious persecution,” Young could honorably evade prosecution until assured due process (which would not occur while McKean remained on the bench). McKean, Kane feared, would imprison Young without conviction “for an indefinite period . . . to break down an old man’s health.” Young, however, stuck to his original strategy and spent the winter of 1871–72 under house arrest in preparation for his trial. Though disregarded for the present, Kane’s counsel for Young to evade imprisonment by going underground foreshadowed the course Mormon leaders took during the polygamy prosecutions of the 1880s.⁹ As requested by Young, Kane lobbied the Grant administration through Pennsylvania senator Simon Cameron, two years after Grant and Cameron visited McKean County. The Saints, Kane assured Cameron, would “continue deferentially submissive” if they could “retain any hope of their obtaining Justice in the National Courts of Law.” Even as he affirmed the Mormons’ patriotism, though, Kane raised the specter of Mormon disloyalty as he had in 1846. He informed Cameron, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that the Mormons planned to send a delegation to “solicit a grant of land in British Columbia” and seek “a charter guarantying them perfect freedom of Religious observances polygamy in short.” (At the same time, Kane threw cold water on any such attempt, reporting to Young that the British government would not “grant any concession to which the U.S. were opposed.”) In addition, a crisis over Utah would negatively affect the national “Money Market” and economy. Finally, raising once again the symbol of the suffering Saints, Kane argued that “any grand suffering” among the Mormons would lead to a backlash against the administration.¹⁰ Kane’s arguments, which Cameron took to the president, failed to sway Grant. He “listened attentively, and spoke as he always does, in very proper terms of yourself,” Cameron told Kane, “but he gave no opinion relating to the Mormon troubles.” Kane’s visits to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and Grant in November 1871 also proved futile. However, in April 1872, the U.S. Supreme Court brought a premature end to McKean’s judicial crusade, declaring a number of

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his methods (such as jury selection) unconstitutional, thereby annulling some 130 indictments against Young and other Mormons. The episode invigorated another Mormon effort to obtain statehood in 1872; Young hoped Kane could finally shepherd a statehood bill through Congress. Even if the attempt failed, Young believed that a statehood campaign would “go far towards transferring the seat of war from S. L. City to Washington, and change the character of the contest from what it has been, to one of a more political character.”¹¹ The Saints relied on Kane’s political influence, but he also remained emotionally tied to them. Cannon wrote Young in March 1872 that Kane’s “heart overflows with love and sympathy for you and for the people. Zion (he does not use this name) and her welfare occupy an engrossing share of his thoughts.” The state of Kane’s health, Cannon observed, mirrored the Mormons’ political prospects. Kane’s inability to persuade Grant to remove McKean sparked a period of ill health and “low spirits,” with him feeling “there was little left for him but to die.” To boost Kane’s emotional and physical health, Cannon urged him to visit Utah and told Young that Kane would do so if he could have the “unrestricted opportunity of enjoying your society,” which Kane correctly surmised could happen only during Young’s annual winter visit to St. George in southern Utah.¹² Young’s own entreaties for Kane to travel to Utah had accelerated during the early 1870s. “Let me assure you,” he told Kane, “there is not one among the thousands who will cross the plains this season to whom the Latter-day Saints would more cordially extend the hand of warm welcome.” In 1871, Kane announced his intention to write Young’s biography and travel to Utah to “complete the collection of my materials.” The following year, Kane made definite plans for a winter visit, provided he would be “received very quietly” and be able to “make a generous demand upon your time” to research the proposed biography. He also hoped to recuperate his health, which had been overtaxed by his exertions on behalf of Greeley’s presidential campaign and his own failed congressional bid. Before his journey, Kane “could scarcely, with the aid of crutches, move from one room to another.”¹³ Kane’s visit to Utah during the winter of 1872–73 established much of the agenda for his relationship with the Saints during the final decade of his life. His proposed biography faded from view, and neither a manuscript nor notes have survived. Other objectives quickly emerged in extensive conversations with Young, including strategies to protect the Saints from hostile legislation, mold Mormon public image, prepare Young’s will, expand Mormon settlement into Arizona and Mexico, and influence the Saints’ educational policy and communitarian practices. Along with Elizabeth, two of their sons, and a black servant, Kane arrived in Salt Lake City on November 26, 1872. Though still skeptical

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FIGURE 15. A photograph of Elizabeth Kane taken during the Kanes’ visit to Utah in the winter of 1872–73. (Reproduced by permission from the Ronn Palm Collection, Museum of Civil War Images, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.)

of the Saints, Elizabeth was immediately impressed by their affection for her husband. She wrote their daughter Harriet: “Father is like another man here. It would delight you to see how this people worship him! . . . He has kept so quiet that we know nothing about him except what we have seen.” Their Utah hosts probably viewed their visit as a prime opportunity to convert them to Mormonism. Elizabeth wrote home, “If I am not converted it won’t be for want of preach-

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ing to ‘Sister Kane.’” The rapid improvement in Thomas’s health exceeded Elizabeth’s “fondest wish.” Even the news of Greeley’s death, which arrived in Utah soon after the Kanes, did not sink Thomas into depression, as it might have otherwise.¹⁴ After a stay in Salt Lake City until December 12, the Kanes accompanied Young and his entourage (composed of about sixteen people, members of Young’s family and other prominent Saints) on their annual tour of Utah’s southern settlements. Elizabeth commented, “It is a sort of Royal Progress in a primitive Kingdom with Father for Queen of Sheba!”¹⁵ The journey of roughly three hundred miles to St. George, renowned for its mild winters, took twelve days; the company traveled the first thirty-five miles to Lehi by railroad and then the rest by carriage. In St. George, Kane’s health initially improved. Elizabeth recorded in early January that he “was able to walk over two miles today without pain, a thing he has never done since the War.” The next month, however, Kane became very ill, “perhaps from cold taken in his wounds.” As a result, he “endured frightful suffering, and lay long at the point of death.” During Kane’s sickness, the Saints constantly attended to him and his family and he recovered from this setback. On one occasion, as Elizabeth returned to his sickroom, she found Young personally watching over a sleeping Kane. She wrote, “I find myself thinking kindly of this man, too!” The following December, Elizabeth marveled at Thomas’s improvement while in Utah: “I never saw so great a change in any one in so short a time as the few months in the dry balmy climate effected, aided by the total change of habits and thoughts. He laid aside first one crutch, then another, and then his stick.” She even thought him “as strong as he was before the War.”¹⁶ The Mormons’ care of Thomas transformed Elizabeth’s views on them (as it had cemented Thomas’s own relationship with the Saints in 1846), as she felt “indebted for his recovery to the kind and able nursing of the Mormons.” She resolved, “If I had entries in this diary to make again, they would be written in a kindlier spirit.” Indeed, Elizabeth consented, along with Thomas, to receive the distinctly Mormon ritual of a patriarchal blessing, explaining: “I don’t see what the harm is. I am sure it won’t make a Mormon of me.”¹⁷ Experiencing the climate of fear among the Saints created by potential antipolygamy legislation also contributed to Elizabeth’s changed views. After the Supreme Court quashed McKean’s judicial efforts to rein in polygamy, President Grant turned to Congress, asking for action on Utah in February 1873. New Jersey senator Frederick Theodore Frelinghuysen, the heir of a family that had long united politics and evangelical reform, complied. In addition to making changes in the Utah judiciary, his legislation sought to repeal woman suffrage in Utah,

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prompting protests from national suffrage associations. (Though opponents of polygamy had initially assumed that oppressed Mormon women would vote against church authorities, the opposite actually occurred.) The Saints’ avowal of staunch resistance to the bill, which passed the Senate but not the House, impressed Elizabeth. She described one woman: “Like most of the women she contemplates giving up everything and going again into the wilderness rather than give up Polygamy.” Elizabeth’s own suggested solution, the legalization of current plural marriages in exchange for a ban on future ones, likewise met with little approval among the Saints.¹⁸ As evidence of her new sympathies for the Saints, Elizabeth wrote Senator Cameron to battle the proposed anti-polygamy legislation. Reminding Cameron that in her home he had “cemented your friendship with Grant,” she claimed authority as the “only ‘Gentile’ woman of respectability who has been admitted freely into their homes, and to the society of the women.” While she had expected Utah to be a “sink of corruption,” Elizabeth instead found the women to be “modest quiet housewives” and satisfied with polygamy. Echoing statements her husband had made during the Utah War, Elizabeth claimed that persecution would strengthen Mormonism, making the women “cling closer to their faith” and “leave their present homes as they left their former ones.” In her view, polygamy could be conquered only through integrating the Saints into the national economy and culture. Elizabeth’s hopes aligned with Brigham Young’s fears: “Let Luxury come in from the East and corrupt the habits of these people, and Polygamy will die of itself.” Should Congress pass anti-polygamy legislation, she envisioned a doomsday scenario: “The sufferings the women & children will undergo you men cannot imagine, but if they are forced to choose between their faith and their homes they will go out to die by thousands and the administration of Grant will be known as that of the most infamous persecution that has disgraced humanity. And what good will have resulted from it? A discomfited Methodist orator will have had his mortified vanity soothed, but the United States will have suffered the loss of the best class of pioneers she has ever had.” Like her husband, Elizabeth had come to see evangelical persecution as the source of the conflict over Mormonism. She thus urged Cameron to ignore polygamy, support Utah statehood, and end the rule of “carpet-baggers.”¹⁹ Following their return to Philadelphia in March 1873, Elizabeth’s growing defense of the Mormons allowed Thomas to pursue two of his long-held ambitions: alter the image of the Saints and see his wife develop as an author. Thomas encouraged Elizabeth to write an account of her time in Utah based on her letters and journals, and he arranged for publication of her Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey from Utah to Arizona. Thomas also edited her

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journal of their stay in St. George, suggesting he thought of publishing a second book. The status of women had long been central to the national debate over the Mormon Question. Anti-polygamy fiction portrayed Mormon women as victims of patriarchy who had been duped, forced, or coerced into plural marriage. Before her visit, Elizabeth largely accepted the depiction of Latter-day Saint women as either ignorant or covert foes of polygamy.²⁰ In Twelve Mormon Homes, Elizabeth narrated their journey to St. George, focusing on the Mormon families (whom she gave pseudonyms to protect their identity) who housed them on overnight stays. Given access to Mormon domestic life, she wrote perceptively on gender relations, the dynamics of polygamous households, and the physical interiors of the homes. Travel literature about the Mormons was a popular and well-established genre by the 1870s; authors of travel narratives portrayed themselves as objective observers and often took a more positive approach than other writers on the Mormon Question. Even so, Elizabeth’s privileged vantage point as an honored guest in Utah, which gave her an insider’s view of Mormon women and the home front, distinguished her narrative.²¹ Elizabeth’s evolving reaction to polygamy forms the center of her book. At a Mormon religious service during one of the group’s first stops, she “began at once to seek for the ‘hopeless, dissatisfied, worn’ expression travelers’ books had bidden me read on their faces.” She found none. Likewise, Elizabeth initially attributed women’s conversion to Mormonism to their ignorance. She later changed her mind: “These are women sufficiently educated to have studied their Bibles, and are clever enough to feel the difference” between primitive Christianity and contemporary churches. As Elizabeth became more sympathetic to her hosts, she reported their defenses of plural marriage. Mormon women insisted that polygamy brought happiness, both on earth and in the promise of an exalted hereafter. They also repeatedly praised the relationship between sister-wives, who shared companionship and the burdens of child care and domestic work. Even so, some women seemed to admit “that such an intimate friendship, such communion of mind and heart as is possible between a man and his one wife, cannot subsist in polygamy.” Elizabeth thought the example of her own happy marriage would serve as a “stronger missionary sermon than anything I could say by word of mouth.”²² In her writings, Elizabeth noted various benefits of Mormonism for both women and men. In describing Mormon gender relations, she wrote of a paradox that had puzzled Thomas when he first learned of polygamy in the early 1850s: “Thousands of years behind us in some of their customs; in others, you would think these people the most forward children of the age.” Indeed, she

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wrote, “They close no career on a woman in Utah by which she can earn a living.” Besides Mormons’ practical support of women’s “independence,” Elizabeth praised Mormon worship services and increasingly saw the religion as similar to orthodox Christianity. She also admired Mormon industry, which had “redeemed these little fertile oases from the desert.” Finally, Elizabeth, who had often complained of the perceived polarity of religiosity and manliness, praised the Saints for creating a muscular Christianity. At one meeting, she remarked of a speaker, “I like to see a young man who is no milksop, acknowledge his belief in an open frank way.”²³ Elizabeth grew to respect Mormon culture, but she remained deeply suspicious of Brigham Young. She recognized his leadership, crediting him with “cunning insight” and admiring his “constant intercourse with his people.” However, she accused Young of selfishly leading his people into polygamy: “I felt sure that he could not believe that that was a divine ordinance which sacrificed those women’s lives to his.” After hearing an “eloquently spoken” discourse from Young, she declared: “Poor Brigham Young. With such powers, what might he not be but for this Slough of Polygamy in which he is entangled!” Three decades later, she confided to a nephew that although Young had been “just as kind and hospitable to me as he could be,” she “loathed him.”²⁴ Even though she always disliked Young, Elizabeth railed against the Saints’ political adversaries, groaning that “it will be in the name of the Law that our President and Congress will bully and terrify these helpless women and innocent little children.” Again blaming the evangelical culture of reform, she charged, “The Political Methodists are set on their ruin, and the politicians almost feel virtuous themselves in carrying out their policy towards the Mormons.” She feared the Saints would be driven from Utah and wrote, “five times the Mormons have been exiled for their faith already.” Whereas she had written approvingly to Cameron that American culture and economic prosperity would defeat Mormonism, she now lamented the possibility: “No use for us to ‘put down the Mormons.’ The World, the Flesh, and the Devil sap earnestness soon enough. And I for one shall say, Alas!” Elizabeth nevertheless remained more skeptical of the Saints than Thomas. Upon leaving, she wrote, “Farewell, Arcadia! Or Pandemonium—Which?”²⁵ Elizabeth apparently did not intend to publish her manuscript; but in 1874, without her knowledge, Thomas decided to print a small number for private circulation. Another proposed anti-polygamy law inspired Kane to take on a more ambitious project. Authored by Virginia representative Luke Poland, the original bill contained provisions to repeal woman suffrage, limit Mormon control of juries, and empower federal judicial officials at the expense of local authorities.

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According to his father-in-law William Wood, Kane feared that passage of the Poland Act could result in a “bloody war or to drive forth unto Mexico all the Mormons leaving their pleasant houses & fertile fields to a set of scamps.” Such a scenario persuaded Kane and Wood to publish Elizabeth’s book in hopes that “a knowledge of the actual truth” might prevent or mitigate the hostile legislation.²⁶ In addition, Elizabeth’s narrative specifically answered Mormonism’s current most popular critic. That spring, Ann Eliza Webb, a divorced wife of Brigham Young, had launched “one of the most spectacularly successful lecture tours of the nineteenth century.” Webb’s lurid portrayal of Mormon domestic life starkly opposed Elizabeth’s; where Elizabeth saw Mormon homes as models of harmony and faithfulness, Webb described Young’s families as marred by “jealousies, violence, and deception.” Elizabeth’s book could thus help soften the general atmosphere of anti-Mormonism as well as rebut the specific claims of its most sensational contemporary detractor. In March 1874, Kane contracted with a Philadelphia publishing firm to print 200 to 250 copies as an initial run.²⁷ Even so, Thomas, who had long hoped Elizabeth would become an author, moved with a curious tepidness. Both Kanes professed reluctance to publicly distribute the book and sought advice. Cannon thought it would “do good and dissipate many prejudices and misconceptions.” Furthermore, he assured the Kanes that the occasional negative comments would not offend the Saints: “The people of Utah fully understand that rose-colored notices of them are viewed with distrust.” Charles Shields, the Kanes’ former pastor and brother-inlaw (Kane’s sister Bessie had died in 1869) and now a professor in the “harmony of science and revealed religion” at Princeton, praised Elizabeth’s narrative as “admirable in all respects, for style, good sense, good taste, philosophy, humor, impartiality. . . . It could be the best contribution yet made toward the solution of the greatest riddle of American civilization.” Wood agreed, thinking it “cannot fail to do good by exciting a sympathy & sorrow for the Mormons in their trials & earnestness of faith.” After reading the manuscript, Wood deemed Mormon polygamy “infinitely better than the Polyandry of New York prostitutes & the Polygamy of the men.”²⁸ Wood’s comments on the relative merits of Mormon plural marriage may have troubled rather than comforted the Kanes. Since his private statements against polygamy in the early 1850s, Thomas had maintained a studied silence on the practice. Although he staunchly defended the Mormons’ right to practice polygamy, he personally disdained it. Like Elizabeth, he rooted his opposition to polygamy in the paradoxical relationship between Mormonism and the women’s rights movement. While he lauded Mormons’ views on woman suf-

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frage and employment, he saw polygamy as fundamentally antithetical to the advancement of women. Elizabeth’s book, Thomas feared, might “reconcile other well intentioned women to the horrible relations in which they are placed to man” and possibly “do much harm by painting in colors the attractions of the maternal and religiously sentimental life.” For Kane, polygamy itself was not the core problem, but a symptom of larger ills that afflicted both Mormon and American culture: patriarchal marriage and a religiously inspired domesticity. As a consequence, Elizabeth and Thomas thought of “locking” up her manuscript “for purposes of posthumous vindication.” Nevertheless, the threat of the Poland Act prompted Kane to move forward, though he displayed his reticence by asking Wood to write the foreword and by identifying neither Elizabeth nor himself on the title page or in the text. Rather than use the opportunity to establish Elizabeth’s reputation as an author, Thomas obscured her role, listing the author only as Wood’s daughter.²⁹ In June 1874, Kane sent Cannon and Wood advance copies of Twelve Mormon Homes to disseminate to politicians and the press in hopes of heading off the “rascally Congress which favours the Poland Bill.” Kane also helped in the distribution, sending a copy, for example, to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Cannon targeted senators, particularly those on the Judiciary Committee, who might be influenced by the work. For his part, Wood visited various New York newspaper editors (such as William Cullen Bryant of the Evening Post) to obtain favorable notices. Wood hopefully reported that editors had told him “that public opinion is in a very balanced state on the Mormon question. The people don’t like them, & at the same time they don’t like persecution & your Book if speedily published, in its entirety, ought just have the desired effect of stopping the persecution & getting the Mormons let alone.” Wood’s foreword made clear the book’s political purpose, stating it had the “design of commanding sympathy for the Mormons, who are at this time threatened with hostile legislation.”³⁰ As Kane, Cannon, and Wood distributed the initial copies of Twelve Mormon Homes, the Senate debated the Poland Act after its passage by the House of Representatives. Positive newspaper reviews of Elizabeth’s book explicitly connected it with the congressional deliberations. One reviewer echoed her central conclusion: “Before reading this little book I looked upon Mormonism in the abstract, and wondered how our Government could tolerate such an abomination, but I now understand that it must be left alone, for it will only thrive by what would be looked upon as a religious persecution.” Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun promised Kane a favorable review “long before the President gets a chance to sign” the Poland Act. The Kanes’ friend Eli Price, always ready with superlatives, lauded Elizabeth: “You will remove much prejudice; allay hostility; may even

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prevent war.” Price sounded like a Mormon apologist, “Shall we then persecute or destroy the Mormons, who are devout Christians, and fully believe in all the Bible, and are only too much like David and Solomon, the great favorites of God, in having many wives?”³¹ The positive press may have contributed to a substantial weakening of the Poland Act before the Senate passed it in late June 1874. Rather than repeal woman suffrage and remove the Utah judiciary from Mormon hands, the legislation merely restricted the jurisdiction of the local probate courts and increased the powers of some federal judicial officials. Claiming victory, the Saints dismissed the amended bill as a symbolic, toothless gesture. Given the complexities of congressional votes and the vagaries of public reception of any book, the exact influence of Elizabeth’s work is difficult to delineate. Nevertheless, it seems that positive press on the Saints, partly a result of the initial reviews of Twelve Mormon Homes, softened the political atmosphere. Wood claimed that Elizabeth’s book “deprived [the Poland Act] of its worst features before it became law.” As a result, Wood pushed the Kanes to allow a much larger publication run. However, they refused, most likely because their reluctance to promote polygamy reasserted itself once the Poland Act became law. Elizabeth’s book was republished a century later and remains one of the most intriguing accounts of the domestic dynamics of Mormon plural marriage.³² Besides serving as a springboard for Elizabeth’s authorship of Twelve Mormon Homes, the Kanes’ stay in Utah inspired Thomas to urge Young to disentangle his convoluted economic relationship with his own church. In 1862, the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act had limited the value of property owned by the church to fifty thousand dollars. To evade the seizure of church lands, Young and other leaders had taken possession of various properties as trustees; as a result, Young’s own extensive real estate holdings and business interests and those of the church had become, in Kane’s estimation, “confusedly interwoven in a manner likely to prove prejudicial to both.” Kane rightly perceived that this situation, combined with Young’s large number of heirs, could become a paralyzing quandary after Young’s death. He thus encouraged Young to immediately address the problem and agreed to become an attorney for both Young and the church. After examining Young’s affairs, however, Kane insisted that Young and the church retain separate counsel. Mormon leaders disagreed, stating that they could not see “any discrepancy of interests as existing or likely to arise,” but they acquiesced to Kane’s advice. As a result, Kane recruited Eli Price, an expert in probate law, to serve as cocounsel for the church; should differences arise, Kane would represent Young and Price the church.³³ In 1873, with Price’s help, Kane prepared Young’s will and helped him sepa-

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FIGURE 16. Thomas Kane in 1874. (Reproduced by permission from the Ronn Palm Collection, Museum of Civil War Images, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.)

rate his personal businesses and properties from the church, which he believed to be Young’s “duty above all other duties.” Understanding the complexity of Young’s business dealings and resolving his intricate financial relationship with the church proved daunting. “There is scarcely a feature of your case that is not bristling with law points,” Kane told Young. By “devoting myself exclusively to its study for the next half year,” he could “only expect to put things into the best trim to meet the litigation which, after, if not before your death, you had

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better be prepared to look upon as inevitable.” Cannon and Brigham Jr. traveled to Kane, Pennsylvania, in June 1873, to discuss Young’s will and legislative strategy. Brigham Jr. wrote his father, “For days and days we have kept the nozzle of the jug open and been filled to overflowing.” In November, Young expressed satisfaction with the will drawn by Kane and Price: “I think it embodies a very comprehensive and equitable plan, and seems to be admirably adapted for large families.” On Kane’s advice, Young also signed over many of the church properties in his own name, including Temple Square, to George A. Smith, his successor as trustee-in-trust for the church (though many of these properties reverted back to Young on Smith’s death two years later).³⁴ Kane’s foresight averted a potential crisis following Young’s death in 1877. During the disposition of Young’s estate, Kane corresponded with the executors of the will, particularly Cannon and Brigham Jr., regarding how to head off legal challenges. Although a few heirs legally disputed the document (gaining an out-of-court settlement for themselves), most heirs and Mormon leaders pronounced themselves satisfied. Cannon reported, “The sharks have tried to devour; but they have been greatly disappointed thus far,” thanks to Kane’s “invaluable” assistance. Kane’s sage advice to legally separate and define the interests of the church and Young proved to be one of his important services to both.³⁵ While in Utah, Kane also designed with Young a plan to establish Mormon settlements in Mexico as a possible site of refuge from U.S. persecutions. Contemporary political conditions in Mexico seemed promising for colonization. During the ascendancy of Mexican liberals between 1855 and 1876 (a period known as La Reforma), government officials sought to secularize Mexican society by weakening the Catholic Church. Thus, the government allowed the entrance of Protestant missionaries and encouraged foreign colonization with land grants and other inducements. Mormon theology—in particular, its view of indigenous peoples of the Americas as descendants of the ancient civilizations described in the Book of Mormon—dovetailed with the renewed pride in Mexico’s pre-Spanish heritage inspired by La Reforma. The Saints had various reasons to pursue colonies in Mexico. Eschatologically, they looked forward to a day when the church would fill both North and South America and saw the conversion of Latin American Indians as a necessary precondition to Christ’s Second Coming. The heightening of the anti-polygamy movement in the early 1870s prompted Mormons to seek a possible site of refuge should they be forced from Utah. Both Kane and Young believed the Saints could obtain concessions from Mexican officials that would allow them to practice polygamy without government interference.³⁶ Other motives also inspired Kane. Continuing his romantic fascination with

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the West, he looked to the Southwest and Mexico as the next frontier for U.S. colonization, development, and promotion. His views of the global expansion of liberty, a product of his time in Democratic reform and the Young America movement, also framed Kane’s interest. During a visit to Mexico in 1876, he jotted in a notebook: “The West played out. Now, all that is left is sw.” Modifying the dictum of his old friend Greeley, he exclaimed, “Go Southwest, young man go Southwest.” According to Elizabeth, Kane envisioned an “ultimate union between Mexico and the United States, and the present establishment of intimate commercial relations.” Just as Kane’s attraction to the West had partly inspired his original association with the Saints in 1846, so the lure of the Southwest fired his imagination and propelled his drive to expand Mormon settlement into Mexico.³⁷ Kane and Young apparently agreed that Kane would research locations in Mexico and seek land grants while Young would organize the colonization. A gathering place in Mexico would require Mormon settlements in Arizona as way stations between Utah and Mexico. As such, Young immediately dispatched an initial exploring company to northern Arizona in December 1872. A colonizing mission followed in April 1873, but the participants deemed the deserts of northern Arizona inhospitable and soon returned. Chagrined, Young announced in July 1873 that he would personally lead an expedition that October. He failed to do so but told Kane in November, “I have forgotten nothing connected with Arizona; my eye is constantly on the mark.” In December 1873, Kane reported equally discouraging news, informing Young that his efforts “with the land grant matter in the City of Mexico” had failed. In both 1875 and 1876, Young sent small groups of missionaries to look for sites of settlement in northern Mexico and to proselyte. A variety of problems delayed Mormon settlement of northern Arizona until 1876, when colonists began to establish permanent communities in the Little Colorado basin.³⁸ That year, perhaps spurred by news of the missionaries to Mexico, Kane renewed his efforts to locate a site for a Mormon colony. In April 1876, Kane told Cannon of his desire to travel to Mexico and “take a few of the folks with him and get them introduced.” “Full of the Mexican project,” Kane visited Cannon and the “Mexican Ministers” in Washington. Besides finding a possible site of refuge for the Saints, he envisioned protecting Mexican indigenous groups (as he had Alaskan Native Americans) and perhaps establishing his own colony. He thought the “prospects for my Utah friends . . . so flattering,” Kane wrote to Young, that they no longer needed his assistance; thus, he stated, “I am turning my thoughts upon the condition of others who may soon need championship.” As a consequence, he had begun to study the “interesting indigenous nations

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of New Spain, and find them to be too good and gentle for the American Knife which is drawing near their throats.” Furthermore, the Mexican minister to the United States, Ignacio Mariscal, informed Kane that Mexican Indians would work cheaply and efficiently for “Judicious employers.” Kane also considered taking a “few Swedish artisans,” whom he had recruited to the Alleghenies, with him to Mexico, either to “found me a quiet winter home” or simply to “look around . . . at least for the present.”³⁹ Combining, for the moment, his interests in Swedes and Saints, Kane designed a plan in 1876 that called for Young to send a company of Mormons to accompany Kane into Mexico that fall. Cannon noted Kane’s specific instructions: “Our company should be at least 20 and from that to 30 . . . should be judicious men with kindly feelings towards Lamanites; pure men and non-speculators; obedient and amenable to discipline; good judges of quality of land and how it can be irrigated . . . some should speak Scandinavian.” While he quickly jettisoned his idea of transferring Swedes from the Alleghenies to Mexico, Kane worked tirelessly to prepare for his expedition. He “obtained a very strong letter” from President Grant, as well as letters from the departments of state and war, that would “enable him to get any aid, provisions, &c. from any of the posts of the U.S. Marshal.” Grant also wrote to the Mexican minister, displaying his “strong interest” in Kane’s proposal. Young’s reticence, however, torpedoed Kane’s plan, as Young “could not see the way clear to send anybody.” Even so, Kane forged ahead.⁴⁰ In the fall of 1876, Kane thus spent three months in northern Mexico, primarily in the states of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila but also in Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, along with two sons, his personal doctor, and a friend. As always, Kane had several motivations for the trip; besides the search for a Mormon sanctuary, he sought to recover his health, witness a Mexican civil war, conduct ethnological studies of Mexican indigenous groups, and research railroad routes. Kane’s son Elisha, who accompanied him, characterized the decision: “Being of an active energetic Irish disposition he could not bear to be idol [sic] even long enough to regain his health and so instead of spending his holiday in Florida like other invalids he sought Northern Mexico.” Border tensions between Mexico and the United States and Mexican civil unrest—prompted by a revolt against the liberals and La Reforma led by Porfirio Diaz, who would rule the country for the next thirty-five years—also attracted Kane. Elisha recorded that the civil war “roused the martial spirit within his breast of former days”; indeed, Kane entertained hopes “of serving our government in the border complications.”⁴¹ Though crippled by his wartime wounds, Kane still envisioned himself in the role of romantic hero, brushing aside danger to intervene in a perilous situation.

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He recounted his trip to Young: “The time was particularly favorable for my purposes, as I seemed to hit upon the very crisis of the Revolution at each point I touched just as I reached it.” Kane’s government credentials allowed him to “associate with all the leading public characters I wished to meet when, under the uncertainty of success or defeat, they were least upon their guard,” and he thus acquired “almost priceless information on Mexican affairs.” Travel and exposure to danger predictably invigorated his health. Cannon described him after his return as “looking well” though “a little thinner than usual.”⁴² After his return, Kane gave a lecture before the American Philosophical Society (later published as a pamphlet, Coahuila) that focused on his forays into Mexican ethnology. While U.S. and European scientists had largely ignored Mexico, Kane argued that research there held great promise. He particularly advocated the study of Mexican craniology, helpfully noting that the recent warfare had left the skulls of a “great number of healthy, full grown youths, of known habitat and pedigree . . . at the command of the collector.” He had even conducted his own field research, examining more than three hundred Mexican soldiers from a variety of indigenous origins. His research and his study of Mexican history confirmed for Kane the conclusions he had drawn twenty years earlier in his “Africanization of America.” Racial intermixture, he lamented, caused numerous social ills, including the current political chaos; furthermore, it “introduces anarchy into social circles, into the family itself.” Kane thus continued to find scientific proof of the horrors of racial mixing, whether between whites and blacks or Europeans and Native Americans.⁴³ While in Mexico, Kane also scouted locations for Mormon colonies. Cannon stated to Young, Kane “feels delighted with his trip to Mexico, and thinks that he was inspired of the Lord to go there.” In March 1877, Kane wrote to Young of “several spacious valleys” that would suit the Mormons well. The Saints should act quickly to preempt the “American white savage[s],” who would “buy or steal all of it [northern Mexico] worth having that the Mormons do not succeed in occupying before them.” Furthermore, Kane warned that American influence in northern Mexico could dash any hopes of using the region as a site of refuge. If the Saints wanted to ensure “any privileges or immunities . . . outside or independent of the American System,” a reference to plural marriage, they would need to move swiftly.⁴⁴ After Young’s death six months later, Mormon enthusiasm for Mexican settlement dwindled. Young’s successor John Taylor assured Kane of his “complete sympathy” with “the southern development question” and asked him to continue to seek land grants or other concessions from the Mexican government; but the attempts to establish colonies in Mexico with Kane’s assistance soon fizzled.

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In September 1878, Cannon reported to Kane that Taylor had not experienced “that clearness of vision and those manifestations of the Spirit which he desires to have before commencing any important undertaking.” In particular, Taylor feared that Mexican political turmoil could endanger any fledgling Mormon communities. For the moment, Mormon leaders put aside the idea of Mexican settlements, a decision that irked Kane. Three years later, Cannon perceived that Kane still felt “sore, I think, over the non-adoption of his Mexican project, which besides his trip to Mexico cost him considerably.” Nevertheless, Kane’s actions laid the foundation for future Mormon settlement in Mexico. The passage of more stringent anti-polygamy legislation in the 1880s again focused Mormon attention to the south. Beginning in 1885, influenced by the original plan created by Young and Kane, hundreds of Mormons moved to Mexico, creating a string of seven Mormon colonies.⁴⁵ The discussions between Kane and Young during the 1872–73 visit also shaped Mormon higher education, a development that particularly pleased Kane. Young had a deep suspicion of both non-Mormon physicians and male midwives, Mormon or not. As a consequence, he had publicly supported the training of female doctors since 1867; only in December 1873, however, after Kane’s visit, did Young call the first Latter-day Saint woman, Romania Bunnell Pratt, to study in an eastern medical school. Not surprisingly, Pratt attended the Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia, becoming the first of several Mormon women to study at the medical school the Kanes supported. The education of Mormon female doctors thus united Kane’s interests in advancing women’s medical education and assisting the Saints.⁴⁶ While Young and Kane agreed that some Mormons should receive professional educations from eastern universities, they also shared a concern for the development of higher education in Utah. In late 1873, Cannon told Kane that Young had resolved “to found an Educational Institution.” Kane exulted that the Saints would “inaugurate a System of Education informed by your own experience of the world” rather than send “your bright youths abroad to lay the basis of the opinions of their lives on the crumbling foundations of Modern Unfaith and Specialism.” Since the able Cannon had recently taken his seat as Utah’s congressional delegate, Kane would be relieved “entirely of my half life long responsibility of mounting guard over the brigands of Washington.” He asked Young, “May it not be that this pause is intended to give us time to attend to what Providence discerns to be the intrinsically nobler work of Education?” In May 1874, Kane “very enthusiastically” shared with Cannon his “views in the education of the rising generation” of the Saints, hoping they would be “educated at home,

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free from evil and corrupting influences and examples, where faith in God and virtue and purity can be preserved.” Kane’s vision corresponded with Young’s own views. During the 1870s, Kane helped prepare legal documents to found Mormon colleges in Logan, Salt Lake City, and Provo. Only the Provo school survived as an independent institution, now known as Brigham Young University.⁴⁷ Finally, during the 1872–73 visit, Kane and Young undoubtedly discussed the Mormons’ communitarian experiments. Following the end of Utah’s isolation with the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, Young advised the Saints to retrench economically, by avoiding non-Mormon merchants and supporting church-sponsored cooperative stores (though he also pragmatically recognized that cautious alliances with outside capitalists could be beneficial). The winter after Kane’s visit, Young began a more ambitious plan known as the United Order of Enoch, which he instituted throughout Utah. Organized on a community basis, the United Orders were generally producer cooperatives in which local Saints, after pooling their property and labor, received profits and income in proportion to what they had contributed. In a few communities, more strict United Orders prevailed, in which the Saints donated all of their resources, aimed for complete self-sufficiency, and shared equally in the products of their labor. In Young’s vision, the United Order would unify the Saints, free them from dependence on outside merchants, and eliminate poverty.⁴⁸ The United Order captured Kane’s imagination, as it did other radical reformers, such as the socialist Edward Bellamy. After Kane’s death, Elizabeth claimed, “much of the Mormons’ prosperity, such as Z.C.M.I. [Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution] their Co-op. Stores, Order of Enoch, communal ranches, sprang from Kane’s ideas transmuted by Brigham Young’s brain.” Certainly, Elizabeth overestimated his influence; the Mormons’ communitarian impulse had deep roots in their theology and early history. In addition, Young organized ZCMI—a network of cooperative stores—in 1868, during the period of little communication with Kane. Even so, her comments, as well as the timing of Young’s implementation of the United Order, suggest that Kane helped shape the Saints’ communitarianism. In any case, the United Order confirmed for Kane the Saints’ progressiveness, and he worked to place the United Orders on a sound legal basis. Although some of the community United Orders lasted for a decade or two, most quickly disappeared, victims of internal disorder, the lure of outside merchants and goods, and the disruption of federal polygamy prosecutions. As with the abandoned Mexico plans, this somewhat disenchanted Kane and he blamed wealthy Mormons for their collapse. As penance, the rich Saints,

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Kane lectured Cannon in 1882, should “spend money upon the press and in defeating measures proposed against us, as they are the ones who have prevented our being in better shape to meet adversity.”⁴⁹ On August 29, 1877, Kane received a telegram: “President Brigham Young died at one minute past four this afternoon.”⁵⁰ The friendship between Young and Kane had lasted thirty-one years. For those three decades, Young had relied on Kane, twenty-one years his junior, as his most trusted outside adviser. Besides Kane’s immediate family, no one influenced the direction of his own life more than Young. The two 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 aristocratic Pennsylvanian. 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 evangelical religion and reform and joined forces to battle what they saw as religious persecution. In 1846, when Kane began his friendship with Young, he saw himself as a disinterested humanitarian taking on the cause of the downtrodden Saints. His relationship with the Mormons became much more than this; unlike the objects of his other reforms, Kane could not keep an emotional distance from the Mormons.⁵¹ 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 conversion, and cultivating relationships between Kane and his own sons. Their friendship proved emotionally satisfying and mutually advantageous. Elizabeth later perceptively wrote that both Kane and Young “had great magnetic power” and “each influenced the other strongly.”⁵² Upon learning of Young’s death, Kane immediately telegraphed Mormon leaders and inquired if they desired his presence: “The answers were urgent: they had been waiting for him before doing anything.” Upon arriving in Utah, Kane discovered that John W. Young had “supposed himself Head and Successor” but was devastated when he “found himself unmentioned by any special manifesto of his father’s.” While Kane did not want to be perceived “as a partisan,” he yielded to John’s frenzied entreaties to stay temporarily at his home. Even so, he carefully avoided intervention in the succession of the Mormon presidency, which (with little discernable controversy) went to the senior apostle, John Taylor. During Kane’s brief stay in Salt Lake, he met repeatedly with members of the Young family as well as church leaders, including Taylor, who (along with

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Brigham Jr. and Cannon) lauded Kane as “our Lafayette.” John Henry Smith, a son of George A. Smith and a future apostle, later remembered that Kane told him he had initially been “somewhat concerned in my spirit as to the position in which matters would be placed, looking, as I naturally did, more from a worldly point of view than from the view of faith.” Kane’s visit, however, convinced him that “the Lord has made ample provision for the preservation of that cause which lies near to my heart.”⁵³ Young’s death did not end Kane’s assistance to the Saints, as he continued to intervene politically for them during the final six years of his life, working particularly closely with Cannon. In 1873, Young called Cannon as a counselor and Taylor (his uncle) later elevated him to first counselor in the First Presidency; in addition, Cannon served as Utah’s congressional delegate until 1882. Throughout the 1870s and early 1880s, Kane frequently assisted Cannon on congressional matters, formulating strategy for attempts at Utah statehood and rebuffing efforts to remove the polygamist Cannon from his seat. Kane often traveled to see Cannon in Washington, and Cannon visited him in Philadelphia and McKean County. Cannon wrote of Kane, “if I were his brother in the flesh he could not feel and act more warmly towards me.” A few years later, he privately reiterated: “I thank the Lord for raising up and inspiring such a true, undaunted and undeviating Friend to Zion as he has been. He is always ready to do anything and everything in his power for us.”⁵⁴ Kane provided Cannon with crucial advice in the Supreme Court test of federal anti-polygamy legislation. In 1872, Young had informed Kane of his desire to transfer the conflict over the Mormon Question from the federal courts to Congress. Three years later, Mormon leaders again shifted strategy, hoping to return the debate over polygamy to the judiciary, confident the Supreme Court would strike down anti-polygamy laws as unconstitutional. Kane contributed to this misplaced optimism. During the 1871 controversy over Young’s imprisonment, he advised William Hooper to introduce a bill in Congress that would allow appeals in criminal cases from the territorial courts to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, suggesting he believed the Supreme Court would strike down polygamy prosecutions. Kane additionally told Young in 1873 of the Supreme Court, “We now count three judges as with us on Constitutional Questions: have probably a majority.”⁵⁵ In 1875, church leaders asked George Reynolds, Young’s youthful private secretary who had recently married a second wife, to serve as a test case. As Reynolds’s case wound through the judiciary, Cannon asked Kane for a recommendation of a “first class and at the same time moderate priced lawyer” to represent the Saints. Kane suggested prominent Philadelphia attorney George W. Biddle:

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“You will make no mistake in enlarging the circle of your acquaintance with men of this stamp.” Cannon pronounced himself “favorably impressed” with Biddle and thought he would “prove a most valuable friend.” Before the court, Biddle argued that the Saints’ practice of polygamy fell under the constitutional protection of the free exercise of religion. In its landmark 1879 decision, however, the Supreme Court upheld Reynolds’s conviction with only one dissenter, distinguishing between protected belief and religious actions “in violation of social duties or subversive of good order,” which could be banned. The Saints regretted their decision to transfer the politics of polygamy to the judiciary, as the court’s decision animated anti-polygamy activists and paved the way for the federal polygamy prosecutions of the 1880s.⁵⁶ Kane’s final lobbying for the Saints occurred in the context of this reenergized campaign against polygamy. In 1882, Senator George Edmunds of Vermont introduced legislation to disenfranchise polygamists and bar them from public office, stiffen the penalties for polygamy up to five hundred dollars and five years in prison, allow judges to exclude jurors who believed in polygamy, and create a federal commission to supervise Utah elections. Alarmed, Kane told Cannon, “we ought to prepare for severe action and act in concert upon [a] well-defined and arranged plan.” He helped Cannon secure the assistance of Jeremiah Black, a Philadelphia lawyer who had been Buchanan’s attorney general during the Utah War, to represent the Saints. Kane considered Black a “strong man” who “could do considerable good,” particularly given the “advantage of his name.” The Saints hoped to use Kane’s own name in a proposed plan for statehood to counter Edmunds’s legislation. John Taylor sent a telegraph in cipher to Cannon asking whether Kane would accept a seat in the Senate. Cannon wired back: “Cannot say about Gen. Kane. Think would embarrass him.” Mormonism’s congressional opponents succeeded both in passing the Edmunds Act and in finally expelling Cannon from Congress in 1882 for practicing polygamy. As a response, Kane advised the Saints to reelect Cannon, as he would remain “your Representative in the sight of just men” and retain “his personal influence” in Congress and the executive branch. Replacing Cannon with a monogamist, Kane declared, would be “unconditional surrender”: “any man who entertains the thought of such a step should be despised!”⁵⁷ The combination of the Reynolds decision and the passage of the Edmunds Act launched an intensified era of federal polygamy prosecutions that eventually persuaded the Saints, after Taylor’s successor Wilford Woodruff announced a vision, to end plural marriage in 1890. In 1896, thirteen years after Kane’s death, Utah finally received statehood after the Saints abandoned polygamy and church control of local politics. The Saints thus exchanged their commitment

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to plural marriage and their theocratic ambitions for an end to federal prosecutions and the right to local self-government. Kane probably would have viewed this compromise with deep ambivalence. Though he disdained polygamy, he had consistently fought for the Mormons’ religious liberty, including the right to practice plural marriage, and advised against capitulation. Woodruff ’s prophetic declaration, however, allowed the Saints to interpret the end of polygamy as a divinely approved adjustment rather than an abject surrender. By channeling their use of religious liberty in new directions, the Saints perhaps would have convinced their old defender that they still advocated the principle for which he had long fought. In any case, Kane conceived of the Saints in the context of anti-evangelical reform to the end. In his narrative, evangelical politicians, ministers, and reformers sought to trample the Saints’ religious liberty. From the expulsion of the Saints from Nauvoo in 1846 to the passage of the Edmunds Act in 1882, Kane blamed evangelical religion and reform for the Mormons’ woes. In many respects, Kane fought an ultimately losing war; only when the Saints jettisoned their most controversial practices would they be free from the threat of coercion against their religion (though, of course, tensions between Mormons and evangelicals continued long past the turn of the twentieth century and indeed remain at the dawn of the twenty-first). Nevertheless, his actions on the national stage—his creation of the narrative of the “suffering Saints,” his mediation of the Utah War, his political advice and lobbying—delayed the final compromise and helped carve out a rhetorical and actual space for the Mormons to practice their conception of religious liberty in nineteenth-century America.

Epilogue

On Christmas Day, 1883, Thomas Kane, a month shy of his sixty-second birthday, was dying of pneumonia in Philadelphia. Twelve days earlier, his daughter Harriet recorded in her diary, “Father was sick all day.” Until Christmas, she noted the illness’s steady progression: “sick with rheumatism,” “rather better but rather forlorn,” “not well,” “very ill with Pneumonia,” “disease in both lungs,” “no better,” “vomited and coughed in the night,” “grew worse all day.” On a stormy Christmas day, surrounded by his wife, children, and brothers Pat and John (a physician), Thomas was conscious at times but “suffered intensely until a few hours of his release.” Knowing the end was near, he gave his family advice and said his good-byes. Thomas instructed Elizabeth to send a parting thought to the Latter-day Saints: “My mind is too heavy, but do send the sweetest message you can make up to my Mormon friends—to all, my dear Mormon friends.” At dusk, the storm subsided and the “night was clear and still.” Harriet noted the constellation “Orion was sinking” as it “did on Christmas nights” in McKean County. Thomas was sinking as well. At 3:30 A.M., “his breathing which had grown quiet stopped,” Harriet wrote, “and Uncle John lifted Mother off the bed.” Thomas was buried at a Presbyterian church he had built in Kane in the late 1870s with an inheritance from an aunt; his funeral was attended by “a large concourse of friends, including many distinguished persons.” A “detachment of the Grand Army of the Republic,” consisting of his Civil War soldiers, reminded the mourners of his military service.¹ Eulogies reveal the perceptions of Kane as a heroic social reformer. Harper’s Weekly called him “chivalric,” noted his “buoyancy of spirit and wayward vigor of nature,” lauded his “independence and freedom from conventional timidity,” and compared him to “earlier and remoter figures of the heroic type.” The

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Philadelphia Times praised him as a “humanitarian and [a] radical” and elevated his adventures to mythic proportions, a true romantic hero. According to the paper, Kane manned the Parisian barricades during the Revolution of 1848 and “carried to his death a bullet received” there. In addition, he had “lived among the Indians” of the Far West and been on a “mission to Mexico” when he first encountered the Mormons. As a Civil War leader, he “led his men with a courage that might have been called desperate had it not always been directed to a well-perceived end.” Even with the exaggerations and inaccuracies, the paper captured Kane’s essence: This remarkable little man was always busy, always doing, always on the go. His home was in McKean county, but he was quite as likely to be in Philadelphia, New York, Mexico, anywhere that his enterprises called him, and wherever he was he was always ready to talk—on religion, philosophy, politics, law, business—with all the emphasis and courage of his strong convictions. That so positive a man was not always easy to get along with goes without saying. What he did, he did himself, and in his own way, but it was done on a broad and elevated plane, and there would be very much more accomplished in Pennsylvania if we had a few more men of the force of Thomas L. Kane.

The eulogy described Kane much as he saw himself, including the frenetic activity, wide interests and travels, trust in his own beliefs, high and sentimental principles, and romantic sense of standing against conventional opinion for the causes he championed.² The Mormon press poured out the grief of the Saints for their persistent advocate. The Deseret News lauded “the hero who has just departed,” writing that Kane had “befriended an unpopular people and manfully stood up against immense odds for their rights.” Furthermore, Kane combined “the qualities of the statesman, the warrior, the independent thinker, the poetic writer and the generous philanthropist.” The Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, a British periodical, announced, “General Thomas L. Kane is dead! Hear it, ye Saints, with bated breath, that long-tried friend, that brave and noble defender of the oppressed, no longer lives to plead with earthly potentates for liberty to the down-trodden, but has gone to plead before a higher tribunal!” Like the Philadelphia Times, the Mormon papers emphasized Kane’s romantic sentimentalism and his iconoclasm.³ Elizabeth outlived her husband by twenty-six years, dying on May 25, 1909. She never remarried and remained committed to Thomas and his memory, attending Bucktail reunions as the “Mother of the Regiment,” defending her husband against posthumous attacks (including the old charge that he had converted

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to Mormonism), and guarding Thomas’s personal papers. Elizabeth continued her own reforms, particularly as a local official of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. In addition, she worked as a physician and, through rising land values, gradually attained the wealth that had mostly eluded the Kanes during Thomas’s life. Two of Elizabeth’s journal entries from 1903 reveal the continued role of Thomas in her life. On April 21, she recorded the “fiftieth anniversary of my wedding day: not to be called our Golden Wedding since the husband of my youth is not here. Nearly twenty years ago he left me, and my Harry [Harriet, who died in 1896] seven. Where are they, and when shall I join them!” Elizabeth celebrated with her three sons and their families: “The day was less sad than I feared.” Two months later, she was invited to represent Thomas at a ceremony commemorating the role of the Pennsylvania Reserves in the Civil War. While she wanted to “do his memory honour,” Elizabeth thought “it will be only a political show, with a great deal of drinking,” and she declined.⁴ As Elizabeth wrote in her 1903 journal, Harriet, their oldest daughter, had also died. Never married, Harriet practiced medicine in Kane and shared her mother’s interest in temperance. She inherited her mother’s devoutness rather than her father’s skepticism and died in church “while leading a prayer meeting and singing the missionary hymn ‘Speed Away!’” By contrast, the Kanes’ three sons—Elisha, Evan, and Thomas—all married, had children, and outlived Elizabeth, dying in 1935, 1932, and 1929, respectively. Elisha followed his father into the railroad business, while Evan and Thomas became doctors and lived in Kane. (Continuing Thomas’s reputation for eccentricity, Evan gained national attention when he twice operated on himself, even removing his own appendix using only a local anesthetic.)⁵ The vagaries of time have mostly erased Kane’s memory and obscured the meaning of his life. In his native Pennsylvania, he is little remembered, known mostly to Civil War buffs and residents of the Alleghenies (who drive on a “General Kane Highway”). The Pennsylvania Bucktails has an active group of reenactors. The town of Kane, still a quiet community, celebrates Kane as its founder and the visionary behind the Kinzua Viaduct. A mansion Elizabeth built after Thomas’s death is operated as a bed and breakfast and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In Mormon country, Kane is still revered as a defender of the Saints and the hero of the Utah War. During Kane’s life, Mormon leaders repeatedly assured him that his name would “live with the Saints to all Eternity.” In the 1940s, church president George Albert Smith encouraged the writing of a biography of Kane, envisioned as the joint effort of Kane’s grandson and a Mormon leader. Smith instructed, “I feel that the Church should rise to its duty and its oppor-

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tunity” to recognize “the sacrifices, the devotion, and the great achievements of our distinguished friend who so valiantly served us in our times of greatest need.” Though worked on intermittently for decades, the project never came to fruition. A statue of Kane, identifying him as a “Friend of the Mormons,” was placed in the Utah State Capitol in 1959. In the early 1970s, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints purchased the Presbyterian chapel where he is buried; it has since been used as a Mormon meetinghouse and as a historical site lauding Kane’s service to the church. The Mormon History Association annually awards a Thomas L. Kane Award “to a person outside of the Mormon community who made a significant contribution to Mormon history.” In this sense, historian Jan Shipps is often called the twentieth-century Thomas L. Kane for her role as a sympathetic outside observer of the Saints.⁶ Though remembered primarily by the Mormon community, Kane’s life has broader significance. What, then, is the meaning of his life? Kane represents a distinct type of nineteenth-century man: the romantic reformer and the heroic gentleman. Influenced by the transatlantic literature on romanticism, Kane emulated qualities central to the tradition of the romantic hero. He preferred decisive action over contemplation; iconoclasm over conformity; individual judgment over social norms; and personal courage over upper-class comforts. His travels to the Mormon camps in 1846, intervention in the Utah War, and actions during the Civil War all demonstrate Kane’s affinity for the image of the romantic hero. In a culture deeply influenced by romanticism and obsessed with heroes, he sought to live up to the mandates of both the romantic vision of the hero and the culture of honor. Doing so allowed him to leave his imprint on the course of nineteenth-century history, most notably through his brokering of a truce in the Utah War and during the Civil War. Kane’s life also suggests the contours of a community of reformers like himself. Though not as well-remembered as other reformers, Kane and his reform allies played crucial roles in the reform movements and debates at the center of American culture in the mid-nineteenth century. During the antebellum era, these reformers were drawn from the ranks of the Democratic Party, defined themselves against the culture of evangelical religion and reform, and advocated a humanitarianism that sought to relieve human suffering. They generally exhibited a far greater openness to cultural, religious, and ethnic pluralism than their Whig and evangelical counterparts. Though many remained traditionally religious, others—like Kane with his meandering personal religious journey—reacted against evangelical reform in part because of their own antipathy to evangelicalism. Their definition of manliness derived from their romantic sense of standing against social injustices in defense of the downtrodden. Most

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of those who inhabited the reform wing of the Democratic Party eventually became Republicans (often with stops in the Free Soil movement and then as Liberal Republicans). At their most visionary, these reformers battled to end slavery, defended religious and ethnic minorities, advanced women’s status in society, and sought to alleviate the suffering of the poor and the imprisoned. Kane’s own reform activities—most prominently, his opposition to slavery and his defense of the Mormons’ religious liberty—sprang from this culture of anti-evangelical, Democratic, romantic reform. In his reform career, Kane addressed and helped shaped the debate on enduring questions involving the relationship between reform, society, and the individual: How should a society balance liberty and order? What are the duties of an individual and a society toward the downtrodden, the suffering, the marginal, the outcast? When is civil disobedience to protest social injustices justified? How can the crushing cycle of urban poverty be broken? How can gender equality be attained? When can an individual and a society legitimately engage in war? What are the limits of religious expression in a democratic society? Kane thus identified and wrestled with the fundamental questions and debates that were at the center of the American reform tradition, and that remain there today. While Kane fit a type, he was also an original. The exact constellation of reform choices, paradoxes, and eccentricities that characterized his life were uniquely his own. In this sense, Kane exemplified the ideal of a romantic hero, which called for an individual to thrust off the constraints of social conventions and expectations and march “to his own music.”⁷

Appendix: Kane Family Chart

JOHN KINTZING KANE (b. May 16, 1795; d. February 21, 1858) married (April 20, 1819) JANE DUVAL LEIPER (b. November 20, 1796; d. February 11, 1866) Their children: ELISHA KENT KANE (b. February 3, 1820; d. February 16, 1857) THOMAS LEIPER KANE (b. January 27, 1822; d. December 26, 1883) JOHN KENT KANE (b. 1824; d. 1824) ROBERT PATTERSON KANE (b. June 9, 1827; d. November 28, 1906) ELIZABETH KANE (b. August 2, 1830; d. October 14, 1869) JOHN KINTZING KANE JR. (b. December 18, 1833; d. March 22, 1886) WILLIAM LEIPER KANE (b. April 2, 1838; d. August 25, 1852) THOMAS LEIPER KANE married (April 21, 1853) ELIZABETH DENNISTOUN WOOD (b. May 12, 1836; d. May 25, 1909) Their children: HARRIET AMELIA KANE (b. July 10, 1855; d. January 9, 1896) ELISHA KENT KANE (b. November 25, 1856; d. February 18, 1935) EVAN O’NEILL KANE (b. April 6, 1861; d. April 11, 1932) THOMAS LEIPER KANE JR. (originally named William Kane) (b. November 17, 1863; d. September 11, 1929) Thomas and Elizabeth Kane had eighteen grandchildren, thirty-seven greatgrandchildren, and at least ninety-one great-great-grandchildren. At least twelve descendants have received the name Thomas Leiper Kane. Source: Jana Darrington, compiler, “Ancestors and Descendants of Thomas L. Kane and Elizabeth W. Kane,” Thomas L. and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University; Bruce Africa, a Kane descendant and family genealogist, e-mail correspondence with author, May 2008.

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Notes

People and archives frequently cited in the notes are identified by the following abbreviations:

PEOPLE BK EDW EKK EWK JDK JKK RPK TLK

Elizabeth (Bessie) Kane (sister of Thomas L. Kane) Elizabeth Dennistoun Wood (wife of Thomas L. Kane before their marriage) Elisha Kent Kane (brother of Thomas L. Kane) Elizabeth Dennistoun Wood Kane (wife of Thomas L. Kane after their marriage) Jane Duval Leiper Kane (mother of Thomas L. Kane) John Kintzing Kane (father of Thomas L. Kane) Robert Patterson Kane (brother of Thomas L. Kane) Thomas L. Kane

ARCHIVES APS BYU Duke HSP LDSCA LOC Michigan

American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia Thomas L. and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University Albert Cumming Papers, William R. Perkins Library, Manuscript Department, Duke University Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Archives/Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan

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290 Stanford Yale Young Collection

Notes to Pages xiii–2 Thomas L. Kane Papers, Green Library, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Brigham Young Collection, LDSCA

INTRODUCTION 1. TLK to Brigham Young, 18 July 1858, Young Collection. 2. Jesse Gove to Family, 14–24 March 1858, in Otis G. Hammond, ed., The Utah Expedition, 1857–1858: Letters of Capt. Jesse A. Gove, 10th Inf. U.S.A., of Concord, N.H. to Mrs. Gove and Special Correspondence of the New York Herald (Concord: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1928), 134; EWK Journal, 18 May 1858, BYU; New York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 22 June 1858. 3. For the Democratic Party as the Kanes’ “faith,” see JDK to TLK, 1 October 1861, BYU. 4. “Death of General Thomas L. Kane,” Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star 46 (21 January 1884): 42–44. 5. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005), 402. 6. “The Late Colonel Kane,” Harper’s Weekly, 12 January 1884, 19. 7. Patriarchal Blessing, John Smith to TLK, 8 September 1846, BYU. Scholarship on Kane has focused almost exclusively on his involvement with the Mormons, including one uncritical biography (published more than forty years ago) and a smattering of articles. See Oscar Osburn Winther, ed., A Friend of the Mormons: The Private Papers and Diary of Thomas Leiper Kane (San Francisco: Gelber-Lilienthal, 1937); Albert L. Zobell, Sentinel in the East: A Biography of Thomas L. Kane (Salt Lake City: Nicholas G. Morgan, 1965); Leonard J. Arrington, “‘In Honorable Remembrance’: Thomas L. Kane’s Services to the Mormons,” BYU Studies 21 (Summer 1981): 389– 402; Richard Poll, “Thomas L. Kane and the Utah War,” Utah Historical Quarterly 61.2 (1993): 112–135; Ronald W. Walker, “Thomas L. Kane and Utah’s Quest for SelfGovernment, 1846–51,” Utah Historical Quarterly 69.2 (2001): 100–119; Darcee D. Barnes, “A Biographical Study of Elizabeth D. Kane” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2002).

CHAPTER 1. RAISING KANE 1. TLK to Brigham Young, 24 September 1850, BYU; Russell F. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A 300-Year History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 208–362. I borrow my chapter title from Mark Metzler Sawin, Raising Kane: Elisha Kent Kane and the Construction of Fame in Antebellum America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, forthcoming). 2. On Kane’s ancestors, see JKK, Autobiography: Myself from 1795 to 1849, ed. Sybil Kane (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1949); George Corner, Doctor Kane of the Arctic Seas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972), 6–17; Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,

Notes to Pages 4–9

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

291

Story of John Kane of Dutchess County, New York (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1921). On JKK, see also Kevin R. Chaney, “John Kintzing Kane,” in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12:369–370. Intensely interested in his ancestors, Thomas Kane spent a great amount of time researching their history and genealogy. JKK, Autobiography, 15; Angela Hewett, “An Introduction to Thomas Leiper,” Bulletin of the Delaware County Historical Society 45.3 (Summer 1994): 1, 7–8. William Elder, Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1858), 18; Ellis Paxon Oberholtzer, Philadelphia: A History of the City and Its People (Philadelphia: S. J. Clarke, 1912), 3:433; Charles W. Shields, “The Arctic Monument Named for Tennyson by Dr. Kane,” Century Magazine (1898): 483–492, as quoted in Corner, Doctor Kane, 14. JKK to JDK, 1 April 1823, 27 February 1825, BYU. JKK, Autobiography, 22–23; Mark Metzler Sawin, “Heroic Ambition: The Early Life of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane,” American Philosophical Society Library Bulletin (Fall 2002), n.s. 1:2. Online: http://www.amphilsoc.org/library/bulletin/2002/kane.htm. JKK to Elizabeth Kintzing Kane, 25 February 1831, BYU; JKK, Autobiography, 26– 27. JKK to JDK, 19 November 1834, 26 November 1835, BYU; JKK, Autobiography, 33–34. On Elias Kane, see L. J. Daly, “Senator from Illinois,” Historical Bulletin 34.1 (November 1955): 22–33. JKK, Autobiography, 42, 67; Henry Simpson, The Lives of Eminent Philadelphians (Philadelphia: W. Brotherhead, 1859), 615–618. The entry on John in Simpson’s Eminent Philadelphians was almost certainly written by Thomas, who was thanked in the acknowledgments. Corner, Doctor Kane, 11; Nicholas B. Wainwright, ed., A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher Covering the Years 1834–1871 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), 292–293. Corner, Doctor Kane, 14; JKK, Autobiography, 5–6; TLK to JKK, 14 February-5 March 1844, BYU; Simpson, Eminent Philadelphians, 613–614; Peter J. Wallace, “‘The Bond of Union’: The Old School Presbyterian Church and the American Nation, 1837– 1861” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2004); Leo P. Hirrel, Children of Wrath: New School Calvinism and Antebellum Reform (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). JKK, “Freedom of Thought,” 26 November 1841, BYU. JKK to JDK, 23 January 1825, 12 November 1833, BYU. JKK to JDK, 27 November 1833, 9 February 1835, BYU. Elder, Elisha Kent Kane, 13–28. TLK to Brigham Young, 24 September 1850, BYU; TLK to EKK, 1 February 1840, BYU; Elder quoted in Corner, Doctor Kane, 25. On Elisha, see also Edmund Blair Bolles, The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999); David Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds: Margaret Fox, Elisha Kent Kane, and the Antebellum Culture of Curiosity (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

292

Notes to Pages 9–17

17. JKK to EKK and TLK, 14 June 1828, BYU; TLK to EKK, 1829, BYU; Corner, Doctor Kane, 18–19; TLK, “The History of the Roman Republic,” n.d., BYU; JKK to William Elder, [17 August 1857], JKK Papers, APS. 18. Charles Coleman Sellers, Dickinson College: A History (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 195–230. 19. JKK to TLK, 1 January 1839, JKK Papers, APS; JKK to TLK, 17 February 1839, BYU. 20. JKK to TLK, 17 February 1839, 14 April 1839, 10 May 1839, BYU; Sellers, Dickinson, 195–230. 21. Sellers, Dickinson, 212–214; J. A. Collins and 17 others to the Faculty, n.d., Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College. 22. Collins and others, petition, [7 June 1839]; Durbin, draft letter to parents of suspended freshmen, n.d.; G. A. Hamill and 43 others to the Faculty, 20 June 1839; Durbin, report to the Board of Trustees, 11 July 1839, all at Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College. 23. JKK and JDK to TLK, n.d. [June/July 1839], BYU. 24. Robert Patterson to Mrs. John Taylor Jr., 10 September [1839], Margaret Dow Collection, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College.

CHAPTER 2. EUROPE 1. JKK to TLK, 15 January 1840, 16 February 1840, 23 February 1840, BYU; Harvey Levenstein, Seductive Journey: American Tourists in France from Jefferson to the Jazz Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 25–26. 2. TLK to EKK, 2 February 1840, BYU; TLK to JDK, 16 April 1840, BYU; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 3. JKK, JDK, and EKK to TLK, 19 March 1840, BYU; TLK to JDK, 20 March 1840, BYU; TLK to JKK and JDK, 7 April 1840, BYU; JKK to TLK, 5 May 1840, BYU; TLK to JKK, 28 July 1840, BYU. 4. William Wood, Autobiography of William Wood (New York: J. S. Babcock, 1895), 1:119; TLK to EDW, 8 May 1852, BYU; Harriet Kane Wood to TLK, 30 November [1840?], BYU; EDW to TLK, 17 September 1842, BYU. 5. Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 23; Lloyd S. Kramer, Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830–1848 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). 6. TLK to EKK, 11 August 1840, BYU. 7. TLK to JKK and JDK, 15 September 1840, 3 September 1840, 17 August 1840, BYU; TLK, draft essay, JKK Papers, APS. 8. TLK to JKK and JDK, 3 September 1840, BYU; TLK to RPK, 21–23 February 1844, BYU; Kramer, Threshold, 39. 9. EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU; Harriet Wood to TLK, 12 October 1840, BYU. 10. TLK, form filled out for Samuel P. Bates, Pennsylvania State Historian, 9 April 1867,

Notes to Pages 17–23

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

293

BYU; “The Pennsylvania Wilderness,” New York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 16 August 1867; Times (Philadelphia), 28 December 1883, reprinted in John H. Campbell, History of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick and of the Hibernian Society for the Relief of Emigrants from Ireland (Philadelphia: Hibernian Society, 1892), 440–441; “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909. TLK to JKK and JDK, 17 August 1840, BYU; TLK to JDK, 30 November 1840, BYU. TLK to JDK, 2 February 1841, BYU. TLK to JKK, 11 December 1840, BYU; JKK to TLK, 5–6 November 1840, 28 November 1840, BYU; TLK to JKK and JDK, 15 January 1841, BYU; Mr. Schermerhorn to JKK, 20 January 1841, BYU. EWK, biographical sketches of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], and 20 December 1873, BYU; E. Kent Kane (grandson), note on transcript of TLK to JKK, 3 January 1840 [1841], BYU. JKK to TLK, 24 January 1841, BYU; Anton-Hermann Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America: The Revolution and Post-Revolutionary Era (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 173–223. EKK to [TLK], 3 June [ca. 1841–42], EKK Papers, APS; EKK agreement with TLK, 24 September 1842, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to JKK, 7 March 1844, BYU. TLK to JKK and JDK, 2 July 1843, BYU; JKK and TLK to EKK, 12–14 August 1843, BYU. TLK to EKK, 8–11 June 1845, BYU. JKK to TLK, 7 October 1843, BYU; JKK to EKK, 31 October 1843, BYU. TLK to JKK and JDK, 16–28 October 1843, BYU; TLK to JDK, 4–14 November 1843, BYU; TLK to JKK, 10–15 November 1843, 15–26 December 1843, 1–14 February 1844, BYU. TLK to JKK, 29 December 1843, 31 January–1 February 1844, 7 March 1844, 15–26 December 1843, BYU. TLK to JKK, 4–14 December 1843, 29 December 1843, BYU. TLK to JKK, 31 January–1 February 1844, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU; TLK to JDK, 24 December 1843, 14–26 December 1843, BYU; Guillaume Tell Poussin, The United States: Its Power and Progress (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1851). TLK to JDK, 24 December 1843, BYU; Irene Collins, “Marrast, Marie-FrancoisPascal-Armand,” in Edgar Leon Newman, ed., Historical Dictionary of France from the 1815 Restoration to the Second Empire (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1987), 679; Louis Bertrand, Mémoires d’un Mormon (Paris: E. Jung-Treuttel, 1862), in Michael W. Homer, ed., On the Way to Somewhere Else: European Sojourners in the Mormon West, 1834–1930 (Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 2006), 111; RPK, sketch of TLK’s life, n.d. [1892], APS; JKK to TLK, 23 December 1843, BYU; TLK to JKK, 31 January– 1 February 1844, BYU. EWK biographical sketches, BYU; Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Gillis Harp, Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1920

294

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Notes to Pages 23–29 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). It is unclear whether Kane met Comte during his first or second stay in Paris (or both), but the second journey is the more plausible time of contact between the two. RPK, biographical sketch of TLK, ca. 1892, APS; RPK to C. Dana, 25 November [1892?], TLK Collection, APS; George Egon Hatvary, Horace Binney Wallace (Boston: Twayne, 1977), 128–139; Gary Williams, Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 117–122; Auguste Comte to “anonymous sender” [TLK], 27 October 1851, trans. James L. Barker, BYU. Mark Y. Hanley, “The New Infidelity: Northern Protestant Clergymen and the Critique of Progress, 1840–1855,” Religion and American Culture 1 (Summer 1991): 203– 226; Richard L. Hawkins, Auguste Comte and the United States, 1816–1853 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936); Hawkins, Positivism in the United States, 1853– 1861 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938); Charles D. Cashdollar, The Transformation of Theology, 1830–1890: Positivism and Protestant Thought in Britain and America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Harp, Positivist Republic, 23–48; Neil C. Gillespie, The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 123–150. TLK, journal, 1851–52; TLK to EDW, 8 May 1852, 30–31 May 1852, BYU. TLK to JKK, 15 November 1843, BYU; TLK to RPK, 21–23 February 1844, BYU; Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). TLK to JKK and JDK, 16–28 October 1843, BYU; TLK to JDK, 24 December 1843, BYU. TLK to JKK, 14 February–5 March 1844, 1–14 February 1844, BYU. JKK to EKK, 26 December 1843, BYU; TLK to JDK, 14–26 December 1843, 23–31 January 1844, BYU; TLK to JKK, 12–17 January 1844, BYU. TLK to JKK, 15 November 1843, BYU; Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 67–70; Sawin, “Heroic Ambition.” TLK to JKK, 15 November 1843, 29 December 1843, 31 January–1 February 1844, BYU; JKK and JDK to EKK, 26 December 1843, BYU. JKK to EKK, 28 January 1844, BYU; EWK Journal, 5 August 1860, BYU.

CHAPTER 3. BEGINNINGS OF REFORM 1. TLK to JDK, 23 January–1 February 1844, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” in Emerson, The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Addresses and Lectures (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1906), 211– 213. 3. For the transition of American culture, see Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). For women and reform, see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Women’s Sphere’

Notes to Page 30

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in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790– 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990). 4. The literature on antebellum reform is vast. A useful analysis is Glenn M. Harden, “‘Men and Women of Their Own Kind’: Historians and Antebellum Reform” (master’s thesis, George Mason University, 2000). Influential older histories that linked evangelical revivalism and reform include Gilbert H. Barnes, Anti-Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1933); Whitney Cross, The Burned-over District (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950). For studies of individual components of the Benevolent Empire, see Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Mark S. Schantz, “Religious Tracts, Evangelical Reform, and the Market Revolution in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 17.3 (1997): 425–466; Anne M. Boylan, Sunday School: The Formation of an American Institution, 1790–1880 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988). For the continuation of evangelical reform after the Civil War, see Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). For evangelical reform in the South, see John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998). For evangelical reform and politics, see Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Richard Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). Most monographs on antebellum reform have focused on evangelical reform. Broader surveys present a more complicated picture. Robert H. Abzug argues that reform began in the evangelical world, but by the late 1830s radical reform had outgrown its evangelical roots and the movement splintered over controversial issues such as women’s rights and abolitionism. While pointing in some respects toward reformers like Kane, Abzug continues to ground the reform tradition squarely in New England. See Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Ronald G. Walters likewise argues that evangelicalism gave antebellum reform its initial impulse and organization but that much of reform later went in more secular directions. See American Reformers, 1815–1860, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997). In his Moralists and Modernizers: America’s PreCivil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), Steven Mintz mixes accounts of evangelical reform with humanitarian reform. In addition, two recent influential histories of the early U.S. republic emphasize these competing reform traditions. Sean Wilentz emphasizes Democratic reformers in The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), and Daniel Walker Howe does the same for evangelical, Whig reformers in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5. Some historians have argued that middle- and upper-class evangelicals, buffeted by the

296

6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to Pages 30–36 rapid changes in American society, used evangelicalism to soothe their own anxieties and attempt to control the lower classes. For representative samples, see Clifford S. Griffin, “Religious Benevolence as Social Control,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44.3 (December 1957): 423–444; Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). For critiques, see Lois W. Banner, “Religious Benevolence as Social Control: A Critique of an Interpretation,” Journal of American History 60.1 (June 1973): 23–41; Lawrence Frederick Kohl, “The Concept of Social Control and the History of Jacksonian America,” Journal of the Early Republic 5.1 (Spring 1985): 21–34; Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). In a revisionist vein, Jonathan H. Earle argues that much of the impetus for antislavery and other antebellum reforms came from Jacksonian Democracy. See Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). See also Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy; John L. Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” American Quarterly 17.4 (1965): 656– 681. Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 236; John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Stauffer, Black Hearts. JKK to EKK, 12 March 1844, BYU; Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 195–240; Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study of Ethnic Conflict (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1975). Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women, 199. JKK to EKK, 12 March 1844, BYU. Feldberg, Philadelphia Riots, 181; JKK to EKK, 14 May 1844, 26–30 May 1844, BYU; Simpson, Eminent Philadelphians, 613–618. TLK to BK, n.d. [1844], BYU. For Cuyler’s anti-Catholicism, see Wallace, “‘Bond of Union.’” TLK to BK, n.d. [1846?], Kane Family Papers, Michigan; TLK to JDK, January 1850, BYU; TLK to JKK and JDK, May 1845, APS. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, BYU; TLK to EKK, 29 May 1846, BYU; TLK to EDW, 8 May 1852, BYU; TLK to William Wood, 10 May 1852, BYU; TLK Journal, 11 April 1852, BYU. John M. Belohlavek, George Mifflin Dallas: Jacksonian Patrician (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977); JKK to EKK, 14 May 1844, BYU. TLK to EKK, September and 5 December 1844, 26–30 May 1844, BYU. TLK to EKK, 26–30 May 1844, BYU; TLK to T. B. H. Stenhouse, [1872], draft, BYU. Paul H. Bergeron, The Presidency of James K. Polk (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 17–18; JKK, Autobiography, 47; TLK to EKK, September and 5 Decem-

Notes to Pages 36–39

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

297

ber 1844, BYU; William Wood to TLK, 20 December 1844; TLK and JKK to EKK, n.d. [June 1844?], APS; Herbert Weaver, ed. Correspondence of James K. Polk (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969– ), 8:5, 75–76, 181–182, 185–187, 199– 200, 266. John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926–1935), 6:353, 35; JKK to EKK, 2–3 April 1845, APS; JKK, Autobiography, 47–48; JKK and TLK to EKK, 9 December 1844, EKK Papers. JKK to J. Miller, 23 August 1845, BYU. EWK, biographical sketches of TLK, 20 December 1873, n.d. [post 1883], BYU; “Death of General Kane: A Brave Soldier and Public Man Passes Away,” Philadelphia Press, 27 December 1883; TLK to BK, n.d. [ca. 1846?], Kane Family Papers, Michigan; “Memoranda and Inventories connected with the Funeral Obsequies of Dr. E. K. Kane,” BYU. Kane’s surviving correspondence is thin for this era and gives only slight evidence of his involvement in anonymous writing. The Latin taught in nineteenthcentury schools emphasized Roman virtues as a way to imbue the young man with character. For example, in a Latin textbook published in the Philadelphia of Kane’s youth (Famous Men of the City of Rome from Romulus to Augustus), every reading is about a famous Roman man. See C. F. L’Homond and James Hardie, Viri Illustres Urbis Romae A Romulo ad Augustum (Philadelphia: Butler, 1839); Carlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (1879; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Thanks to Miranda Wilcox for help on this point. On gentlemen and newspapers, see Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001). TLK to EKK, 20 February 1848, TLK Papers, APS; RPK or JKK Jr. to EKK, 6 December 1844, APS; JKK, Autobiography, 63–64; Joanne Eggert Swenson-Eldridge, “The Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia and the Emergence of String Chamber Music Genres Composed in the United States, 1820–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of Colorado, College of Music, 1995), 19–63. Louis P. Masur, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Pennsylvania Freeman, 14 March 1844, in Masur, Rites of Execution, 117; Albert Post, “Early Efforts to Abolish Capital Punishment in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 68 (1944): 48–50; David Brion Davis, “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787–1861,” American Historical Review 63.1 (1957): 23–46; Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). Masur, Rites of Execution, 121. Henry S. Patterson et al., “Address,” Public Ledger, 3 July 1845; “Abolition of Capital Punishment,” Public Ledger, 12 November 1845. “Abolition of Capital Punishment,” Public Ledger, 13 November 1845; William Wood to TLK, 22 November 1845, BYU; “The Death Penalty,” Pennsylvanian, 18 November

298

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

Notes to Pages 39–46 1845; TLK, “The Prayer of Richard Roe to the Men & Women of Pennsylvania for his life,” Stanford. Masur, Rites of Execution, 138. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS. “The Death Penalty,” Pennsylvanian, 18 November 1845; Valarie H. Ziegler, The Advocates of Peace in Antebellum America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Peter Brock, Radical Pacifists in Antebellum America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). Muster Roll of Company I, First Regiment of Pennsylvania Artillery, 23 September 1844, Judge John Cadwalader Papers, HSP; Francis Shunk to JDK, 20 January 1846, JKK Papers, APS. Robert D. Sampson, “The Pacifist-Reform Roots of John L. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny,” Mid-America: An Historical Journal 84 (Winter/Summer/Fall 2002): 129–144; JKK to EKK, 25 December 1846, EKK Papers, APS. JKK to EKK, 21 January 1847, 25 December 1846, EKK Papers, APS. Lewis Cass to James Polk, n.d., BYU; Charles A. Black and 54 other members of Pennsylvania legislature to Polk, n.d., BYU; JKK to EKK, 25 December 1846, 3 February [1847], EKK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, n.d. [late 1846/early 1847], 25 December 1846, TLK Papers, APS. Corner, Doctor Kane. In May 1845, Kane spent a few weeks outside Taunton, Massachusetts, as a clerk to Alexander D. Bache, a prominent Philadelphia scientist and superintendent of the Coast Survey of the United States, one of antebellum America’s leading scientific institutions. See TLK to JKK and JDK, 10–11 May 1845, 19 May 1845, BYU; Bache to JKK, 21 May 1845, JKK Papers, APS. TLK to EKK, n.d. [June 1844], 6 December 1844, EKK Papers, APS; JKK and TLK to EKK, 26–30 May 1844, BYU; JKK, JDK, and TLK to EKK, 9 December 1844, EKK Papers, APS; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. TLK to EKK, 9–14 December 1844, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 22 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS. TLK to EKK, 8–11 June 1845, BYU; TLK to EKK, n.d. [early 1847], TLK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 7 April 1848, 9 April 1848, EKK Papers, APS. TLK to EKK, 6 December 1844, APS; Sawin, Raising Kane; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 75–91; EKK to RPK, 28 May 1846, 17 October 1846, RPK Papers, APS. TLK to EKK, 27 September 1843, 8–11 June 1845, BYU; TLK to EKK, 9–14 December 1844, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 6 December 1844, n.d. [June 1844], TLK Papers, APS. TLK to EKK, n.d. [early 1847], TLK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 8–11 June 1845, 5 September and December 1844, BYU; Levenstein, Seductive Journey, 65. TLK to EKK, 22 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; [TLK] to EKK, 29 December [1846], EKK Papers, APS.

Notes to Pages 47–53

299

CHAPTER 4. MEETING THE MORMONS 1. TLK to EKK, 29 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Mormonism claimed between 250 and 350 members in Philadelphia in the early 1840s and attracted much attention from the local press. See David J. Whittaker, “The Philadelphia Pennsylvania Branch: Its Early History and Records,” Mormon Historical Studies 6.1 (Spring 2005): 53–66; Stephen J. Fleming, “Discord in the City of Brotherly Love: The Story of Early Mormonism in Philadelphia,” Mormon Historical Studies 5.1 (Spring 2004): 3–27. 2. Richard E. Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852: “And Should We Die . . .” (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 90. 3. Jesse C. Little Journal, 13 May 1846, 17 May 1846, in “Journal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” 6 July 1846, 4–5, LDSCA; TLK to EKK, 17 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. The Kanes had a reputation for insider knowledge into the views of the Polk administration. See Eliza Cope Harrison, ed., Philadelphia Merchant: The Diary of Thomas P. Cope, 1800–1851 (South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1978), 489. 4. TLK to EKK, 29 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to Dallas, 18 May 1846, Jesse C. Little Collection, BYU. Kane later gave Little a letter of introduction to Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft: TLK to Bancroft, 8 June 1846, Little Collection, BYU. 5. TLK to EKK, 27 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. 6. TLK to EKK, [ca. May 1846], 16 May 1846, 17 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 27 May 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 7. TLK to EKK, 16 May 1846, 27 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; EKK to TLK, 14 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; EKK to TLK, 23 August 1850, EKK Papers, APS. 8. TLK to EKK, 17 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. 9. TLK to EKK, 29 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. 10. JKK to EKK, 16 May 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 11. JKK to EKK, 16 May 1846, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 17 May 1846, 16 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. 12. RPK to EKK, n.d., 16 [May 1846], 25 May [1846], n.d. [June 1846], EKK Papers, APS; JKK to EKK, 25 May 1846, 27 May [1846], EKK Papers, APS. 13. EKK to RPK, 2 June 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 14. Will Bagley, ed., Scoundrel’s Tale: The Samuel Brannan Papers (Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 1999), 185–209; Little Journal, 23–27 May 1846, in “Journal History,” 6 July 1846, 6–7. 15. RPK to EKK, 30 May [1846], EKK Papers, APS; TLK to EKK, 29 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS. 16. Milo Milton Quaife, ed., The Diary of James K. Polk During His Presidency, 1845 to 1849 (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1910), 436–439, entries for 29–30 May 1846; Little to Polk, 1 June 1846, in David L. Bigler and Will Bagley, Army of Israel: Mormon Battalion Narratives (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000), 32–35. 17. Quaife, Diary of James K. Polk, 205–206, entry for 31 January 1846.

300

Notes to Pages 53–58

18. Quaife, Diary of James K. Polk, 443–450, entries for 2–5 June 1846. 19. TLK to T. B. H. Stenhouse, draft, [1872], BYU; Will Bagley, ed., The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846 and 1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001), 243; John F. Yurtinus, “A Ram in the Thicket: A History of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War” (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1975), 655–656; Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 417–451; George Q. Cannon to TLK, 29 January 1881, BYU. 20. TLK to Little, 3 June 1846, 5 June 1846, Little Collection, BYU; Little to TLK, 4 June 1846, Little Collection, BYU; Little Journal, 7 June 1846, in “Journal History,” 6 July 1846, 11. 21. W. Ray Luce, “The Mormon Battalion: A Historical Accident,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42.1 (1974): 27–38; Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 37–40; Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 55–56; Polk to JKK, 11 June 1846, JKK Papers, APS; Navy Department to TLK, 8 June 1846, BYU; Polk to TLK, 11 June 1846, BYU. 22. Quaife, Diary of James K. Polk, 463, entry for 10 June 1846; Charles Snyder, Jacksonian Heritage: Pennsylvania Politics, 1833–1848 (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1958), 166–167; JKK to TLK, 15 June 1846, BYU; JKK to EKK, 6 July 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 23. JKK to EKK, 6 July 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 24. JKK to TLK, 18 June 1846, BYU. For an example of sympathetic opinion toward the Mormons, see Harrison, Philadelphia Merchant, 509–510, 513–514. 25. TLK to BK, 20–21 June 1846, Kane Family Papers, Michigan; Little Journal, 5–21 June 1846, in “Journal History,” 6 July 1846, 13; Little to Samuel Brannan, 22 June 1846, BYU; Little to Brigham Young, 22 June 1846, BYU. 26. Little’s notations on TLK to Little, 22 June 1846, Little Collection, BYU; TLK Journal, 23–25 June 1846, Stanford; JKK to EKK, 6 July 1846, EKK Papers, APS. 27. TLK to JKK, 29 June 1846, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to Kearny, n.d. [June 1846], BYU; Kearny to TLK, 29 June 1846, BYU; William Gilpin to TLK, 29 June 1846, BYU; TLK to Bancroft, 11 July 1846, Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, published as Donald Q. Cannon, ed., “Thomas L. Kane Meets the Mormons,” BYU Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 126–128. On Kearny and Fort Leavenworth, see Dwight L. Clarke, Stephen Watts Kearny: Soldier of the West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 109– 115. 28. TLK Journal, 2 July 1846, Stanford; TLK to RPK, 2 July 1846; TLK to JDK and JKK, 3 July 1846; TLK to Uncle William Leiper, n.d. [early July 1846]; TLK to JDK and JKK, 3 July 1846, all in TLK Papers, APS. 29. TLK to JDK and JKK, 4 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to BK, n.d., in Winther, Friend of the Mormons, 11–16. 30. Scott G. Kenney, ed., Wilford Woodruff ’s Journal, 1833–1898 (Midvale, Utah: Signature, 1983–1984), 9 vol., 3:54, entry for 26 June 1846; Young to President Samuel Bent and Council, 7 July 1846, in Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 48; Stanley B. Kimball, ed., On the Potter’s Wheel: The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), 140, entry for 14 July 1846; Joseph Holbrook Journal, 13 July 1846, LDSCA. 31. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 3:58, entry for 11 July 1846; Juanita Brooks, ed., On the

Notes to Pages 59–64

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45.

301

Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844–1861 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1964), 176–177. Yurtinus, “A Ram in the Thicket,” 36–54; TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; “Journal History,” 13 July 1846, 1–5. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 3:59–60, entry for 16 July 1846. Additional works on the Mormon Battalion include Norma Baldwin Ricketts, The Mormon Battalion: U.S. Army of the West, 1846–1848 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996); Sherman L. Fleek, History May Be Searched in Vain: A Military History of the Mormon Battalion (Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark, 2006). [?] to TLK, [July 1846], BYU; RPK to EKK, 17 December [1846], EKK Papers, APS. TLK to BK, 20 July 1846, Kane Family Papers, Michigan; TLK to JKK and JDK, 20– 23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 3:65, entry for 3 August 1846. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; JKK and JDK to TLK, 20–22 July 1846, BYU. H. G. Boyle, “A True Friend,” Juvenile Instructor 17 (1 March 1882): 74. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846; TLK to EKK, 22 July 1846, both in TLK Papers, APS. James Allen to Jesse C. Little, 20 July 1846, Stanford; TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, 24 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to unknown [probably Polk], n.d. [1847?], draft, in Winther, Friend of the Mormons, 34. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, 20 August 1846, TLK Papers, APS; JKK to TLK, 18 August 1846, Young Collection; JDK and JKK to TLK, 6 September 1846, BYU; JKK, to William [Mathiot?], 1 October 1846, LDSCA. For the Kanes’ lobbying, see TLK to Polk, 21 July 1846; JKK to Polk, 29 August 1846; TLK to William Medill, 20 January 1847, 20 April 1847, 21 April 1847, 24 April 1847; TLK to William Marcy, 27 May 1847, 21 June 1847, 22 January 1848; all in Letters Received, 1846–1872, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, microfilm copy at the Utah State Historical Society. See also Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 91–111; Lawrence G. Coates, “Refugees, Friends, and Foes: Mormons and Indians in Iowa and Nebraska,” in James Allen and John Welch, eds., Coming to Zion (Provo: BYU Studies, 1997), 75–85. TLK to JKK and JDK, 20–23 July 1846, 24 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS. TLK to JKK and JDK, 24 July 1846, 20–23 July 1846, TLK Papers, APS; Richard Bennett and Arran Jewsbury, “The Lion and the Emperor: The Mormons, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and Vancouver Island, 1846–1858,” BC Studies 128 (Winter 2000/2001): 37–62. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 3:65–66, entry for 7 August 1846; John D. Lee, Journal, 7 August 1846, typescript, BYU; Young to Polk, 9 August 1846, typescript, BYU. Kane had probably already heard of the Saints’ changed destination, as Young had informed the departing Mormon Battalion of the plans on July 18. See Bigler and Bagley, Army of Israel, 52–53.

302

Notes to Pages 65–70

46. Young to Col. Kearny, Capt. Clary, Major Swords, or whoever may be in command at Fort Leavenworth, 10 August 1846, in Winther, Friend of the Mormons, 21–22; “Journal History,” 14–15 August 1846; TLK to JDK and JKK, 19 August 1846, 20 August 1846, TLK Papers, APS. For the sickness at the camps, see Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 131–147. 47. EWK to Rev. Dr. Buckley, 6 March 1906, draft, BYU; David J. Whittaker, “New Sources on Old Friends: The Thomas L. and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection,” Journal of Mormon History 27 (Spring 1994): 92–93; D. Michael Quinn, “The Practice of Rebaptism at Nauvoo,” BYU Studies 18.2 (1978): 226–232. 48. TLK to [Polk?], n.d. [1847 or 1848], draft, Stanford; EWK to Rev. Dr. Buckley, draft, 6 March 1906, BYU. 49. Blessing, John Smith to TLK, 8 September 1846, BYU. On patriarchal blessings, see Irene M. Bates and E. Gary Smith, Lost Legacy: The Mormon Office of Presiding Patriarch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 50. Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Willard Richards to TLK, 15 September 1851, BYU; TLK to Young, 10 July 1855, Young Collection. 51. RPK to EKK, 17 December [1846], EKK Papers, APS. 52. JKK to EKK, 11 November 1846, EKK Papers, APS; RPK to EKK, 12 November 1846, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to Polk, n.d. [fall 1846], draft, in Winther, Friend of the Mormons, 48. 53. TLK to EDW, 19–21 May 1852, BYU. 54. EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU; Thomas, “Romantic Reform in America.” 55. EWK to Buckley, 6 March 1906, draft, BYU. Elizabeth feared that Buckley would derive his information from William A. Linn, Story of the Mormons, From the Date of their Origin to 1901 (New York: Macmillan, 1902). Linn claimed that Kane had been baptized and “served the Mormons in the East as a Jesuit would have served his order in earlier days in France or Spain” (374). 56. TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection. The Book of Mormon references are to Ether 2:3; 3 Nephi 21:26–28; and 4 Nephi 1:15. 57. TLK, The Mormons: A Discourse Delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March 26, 1850 (Philadelphia: King and Baird, 1850), 47; TLK to EKK, 8–11 June 1845, BYU; TLK to Young, 10 July 1855, Young Collection; TLK, n.d. draft letter, Stanford. 58. Davis Bitton, “George Francis Train and Brigham Young,” BYU Studies 18 (Spring 1978): 410–427; Eric A. Eliason, “Curious Gentiles and Representational Authority in the City of the Saints,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 11 (Summer 2001): 155–190; Joan Iversen, “The Mormon-Suffrage Relationship: Personal and Political Quandaries,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 11 (1990): 8–16. 59. TLK to EKK, 27 May 1846, TLK Papers, APS; JKK to EKK, 7 March 1854, JKK Papers, HSP. 60. For the largely evangelical-led campaigns against Mormonism, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-

Notes to Pages 71–77

303

Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Terryl L. Givens, Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Foster, Moral Reconstruction.

CHAPTER 5. THE SUFFERING SAINTS 1. TLK to Young, 22 September 1846, Young Collection; TLK to [Young and other Mormon leaders], 11 July 1850, draft at BYU. 2. TLK to Young, 2 December 1846, Young Collection; Orson Spencer to Young, 26 November 1846, Young Collection. The literature on the perceptions of Mormonism in nineteenth-century America is voluminous and growing. See especially Givens, Viper on the Hearth; Gordon, Mormon Question. Other useful accounts include David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (September 1960): 205–224; Gary L. Bunker and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Graphic Image, 1832–1914 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983); Gregory Pingree, “‘The Biggest Whorehouse in the World’: Representations of Plural Marriage in Nineteenth-Century America,” Western Humanities Review 50 (Fall 1996): 213–232; Jan Shipps, “From Satyr to Saint,” in Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years Among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Matthew J. Grow, “The Whore of Babylon and the Abomination of Abominations: Nineteenth-Century Catholic and Mormon Mutual Perceptions and Religious Identity,” Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture 73 (March 2004): 139–167. 3. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 402. 4. William E. Huntzicker, The Popular Press, 1833–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995). 5. For his promotion of Elisha, see Sawin, Raising Kane. 6. TLK to Young, 2 December 1846, Young Collection; Orson Spencer to Young, 26 November 1846, Young Collection; TLK to T. B. H. Stenhouse, draft, [1872], BYU. 7. Unnamed correspondent to Pennsylvanian, 11 November 1846, in Pennsylvanian, 25 November 1846, 3; “The Mormons—Their Persecutions, Sufferings and Destitution,” and “Remarks on the Above,” New York Tribune, 16 December 1846, 1–2; “The Mormons,” Pennsylvanian, 26 November 1846. See also Mark Metzler Sawin, “A Sentinel for the Saints: Thomas Leiper Kane and the Mormon Migration,” Nauvoo Journal 10 (1998): 7–27. 8. New York Sun quoted in “The Mormons,” Pennsylvanian, 2 January 1847, 1; Spencer to Young, 26 November 1846, Young Collection. 9. Spencer to Young, 26 November 1846, Young Collection; Willard Richards to TLK, 16–19 February 1847, BYU. 10. Harvey Strum, “Famine Relief from the Garden City to the Green Isle,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 93.4 (Winter 2000–2001): 388–414; Young to TLK, 6 December 1847, Young Collection . 11. Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 140–143. 12. Charles R. Dana, Journal, 1 September 1847, LDSCA, in Bennett, Mormons at the

304

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

Notes to Pages 77–81 Missouri, 304; “The Suffering Mormons,” Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette [Philadelphia], 12 November 1847, 2; “Meeting for the Relief of the Mormons,” broadside, LDSCA. The proceedings were printed in various newspapers. See, for instance, “Meeting for the Relief of the Mormons,” Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette, 13 November 1847, 2. Dana, Journal, in Davis Bitton, “American Philanthropy and Mormon Refugees, 1846–1849,” Journal of Mormon History 7 (1980): 71; TLK, draft newspaper, [November 1847], Stanford. Mary Cable, “She Who Shall Be Nameless,” American Heritage 16 (February 1965): 50–55; Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (New York: Knopf, 1985), 364–365; TLK to Young, 9 December 1847, Young Collection. Young’s response, if any, to Kane’s question is unknown. Richard E. Bennett, We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846–1848 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1997), 302; Ezra Taft Benson to Young, 14 February 1848, Young Collection; “The Victims of Popular Violence,” Evening Transcript [Boston], 3 March 1848; “Relief of Distressed Mormons,” statement of Boston committee written by TLK, in Isaac Clarke Emigrating Company, Journal, 1849, LDSCA; TLK to Jesse C. Little, 25 February 1848, Little Collection, BYU. Adams and Quincy had traveled to Nauvoo in May 1844 and met Joseph Smith. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 3–7. TLK to EKK, 20 February 1848, EKK Papers, APS; “A Call for Sympathy,” New York Tribune, 2 March 1848. Dana, Journal, 28 September 1847, in Bennett, We’ll Find the Place, 304–305, 311; Jesse C. Little to TLK, 24 February 1848, BYU; William Appleby, Autobiography and Journal, 21 February and 4 March 1848, LDSCA. “Mr. Kane’s Letter to Mr. Quincy,” Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser, 16 February 1848, 2. “The Mormons in the Wilderness,” New York Daily Tribune. “The Destitute Mormons,” Warsaw Signal, 18 March 1848; “The Mormons and Col. Kane,” American Courier, 15 April 1848, 2, typescript at LDSCA. Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 472–478. See also Karen Haltunnen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (April 1995): 303–334; Margaret Abruzzo, “Polemical Pain: Slavery, Suffering and Sympathy in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Moral Debate” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2005). Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns Against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women and Children in Antebellum America (Albany: State University of New York, 1984); James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Abruzzo, “Polemical Pain.” TLK to Young, 24 September 1850, BYU; Greeley to TLK, 19 June 1849, 7 August 1849, BYU. Walker, “Utah’s Quest for Self-Government,” 109–116; Arrington, Brigham Young,

Notes to Pages 81–88

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

305

223–227; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 3:513–516, entries for 26 November 1849 and 4 December 1849. TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection. TLK to Young, 24 September 1850, BYU. TLK to Young, 24 September 1850, BYU; “The Mormons. Lecture of J. [sic] L. Kane, Esq., before the Historical Society,” Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette, 28 March 1850, 2. Bernhisel to Young, 24 May 1850, 23 July 1850, in Zobell, Sentinel, 47; TLK to Young, 24 September 1850, BYU. TLK, Mormons, 4, 11. The TLK Papers at Stanford contain drafts of portions of The Mormons. Kane published a second edition of the pamphlet in July 1850. TLK, Mormons, 9–10, 14, 50, 19. TLK, Mormons, 34, 27, 57, 45, 75; William Hartley, “Mormons, Crickets, and Gulls: A New Look at an Old Story,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38.3 (1970): 224–239. Haltunnen, “Pornography of Pain,” 328; TLK, Mormons, 12, 51, 63. Charles Sumner to TLK, 27 December 1850, BYU; Wendell Phillips to TLK, 19 November 1851, BYU; Walter H. Channing to TLK, 22 July 1850, TLK Papers, APS; JKK to EKK, 27 January 1851, EKK Papers, APS. Review of The Mormons, Southern Literary Messenger 17 (March 1851): 170–174; Frederick Douglass, Review of The Mormons, North Star, 3 October 1850; John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Mormons and Their City of Refuge,” National Era, 15 August 1850. Orson Hyde to TLK, 31 May 1851, BYU; Franklin Richards to TLK, 30 October 1851, Stanford; Daniel MacKintosh to TLK, 9 September 1851, BYU. Brigham D. Madsen, ed., Exploring the Great Salt Lake: The Stansbury Expedition of 1849–50 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), 584–590. “In the Name of the Prophet—Smith!” Household Words 3.69 (19 July 1851): 388; [William John Conybeare], “Mormonism,” Edinburgh Review 202 (April 1854): 341– 344; Henry Mayhew, The Mormons: or Latter-day Saints (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1972), 190–234. Walker, “Utah’s Quest for Self-Government,” 114–115. Walker, “Utah’s Quest for Self-Government,” 115–118. TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection; Walker, “Utah’s Quest for SelfGovernment,” 117. Fillmore to Kane, 4 July 1851; Kane to Fillmore, 11 July 1851, all in Frontier Guardian, 5 September 1851; TLK to Young, Kimball, and Richards, 29 July 1851, Young Collection. TLK to Young, 29 July 1851, Young Collection. See “The Mormons Vindicated by ‘Authority,’” National Era, 31 July 1851. TLK to Young, 29 July 1851, Young Collection. TLK to “My dear friends,” 11 July 1850, draft at BYU; Young, Heber Kimball, and Willard Richards to TLK, 15 September 1851, BYU. Thomas G. Alexander, Utah, the Right Place: The Official Centennial History (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1995), 118–120.

306

Notes to Pages 88–95

46. Gene A. Sessions, Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 57, 73, 90. 47. Sessions, Mormon Thunder, 92–93. See also David J. Whittaker, “The Bone in the Throat: Orson Pratt and the Public Announcement of Plural Marriage,” Western Historical Quarterly 18.3 (1987): 293–314. 48. Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling, 323–327, 437–446; TLK Journal, 27–28 December 1851, BYU. 49. TLK to Young, 17 October 1852, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 20 May 1853, BYU; TLK to Young, 18 July 1853, Young Collection. 50. TLK to Bernhisel, 29 December 1851, draft, BYU; Whittaker, “Bone in the Throat,” 295; Sessions, Mormon Thunder, 99, 105; TLK to Young, 21 May 1857, Young Collection. 51. Jedediah M. Grant, The Truth of the Mormons: Three Letters to the New York Herald, from J. M. Grant, of Utah (New York, 1852), 2–4, 8, 10; Sessions, Mormon Thunder, 101–103. 52. Grant, Truth of the Mormons, 44–45, 37, 32, 54–64. 53. Bernhisel to TLK, 18 March 1852, 29 March 1852, 16 August 1852, BYU; “The Mormon Outrages at Salt Lake,” Washington Union, 16 November 1851, republished in The Press, 7 December 1851, Stanford. 54. TLK to William Wood, 21 May 1852, BYU.

CHAPTER 6. FREE SOIL AND YOUNG AMERICA 1. TLK to EKK, 5 December 1847, EKK Papers, APS. 2. TLK to EKK, 5 December 1847, EKK Papers, APS; JKK to EKK, 30 December 1847, 13 February 1848, EKK Papers, APS; JKK to EKK, 25–26 May 1848, BYU. See also Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 12, 115–117, 131–135; Snyder, Jacksonian Heritage, 204–213. The pamphlet, Life of George Mifflin Dallas, Vice President of the United States (Philadelphia: Times and Keystone, 1847), has traditionally been identified as solely authored by John Kane. 3. TLK to BK, n.d., Kane Family Papers, Michigan; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 247; EWK, history, 26 November 1868, BYU; TLK to EKK, 31 May 1855, EKK Papers, APS. 4. TLK to [Young and other Mormon leaders], 11 July 1850, draft, BYU. 5. On antislavery Democrats, see Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery; Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828– 1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, who argue in a revisionist vein that the most important strain of northern antislavery came from the Democratic Party. Earlier studies on Jacksonian antislavery include Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945); Sean Wilentz, “Slavery, Antislavery, and Jacksonian Democracy,” in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and

Notes to Pages 95–101

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

307

Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 202–223. For whiteness studies, see Alexander Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 1–16. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 12; Daniel Feller, “A Brother in Arms: Benjamin Tappan and the Antislavery Democracy,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001): 48–74. In opposition to northern evangelicals, southern evangelicals of both political parties generally supported a stricter separation of religion and politics, largely because of slavery. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 321–322. Feller, “Brother in Arms,” 48, 60. TLK, “Africanization of America,” BYU. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 127; Frederick J. Blue, No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 184–212. TLK to Lewis Cass, 5 September 1848, 20 September 1848, Cass Papers, Michigan. On the Free Soil movement, see also Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Rayback, Free Soil. “Free Soil Meeting in Philadelphia,” North Star, 15 September 1848. “Free Soil Meeting in Philadelphia.” “Free Soil Meeting in Philadelphia”; “The Free Soil Mass Meeting in Philadelphia,” National Era, 14 September 1848. On free labor ideology, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Charles Sumner to D. G. Skervett, TLK, and Henry S. Patterson, 27 August 1848, BYU; Pennsylvania State Central Committee, TLK, Chairman, to Chase, 21 October 1848, Salmon Chase Collection, HSP; Chase to TLK, 31 October 1848, BYU. Polk to JKK, 27 October 1848, BYU. TLK to “dear sir,” n.d., BYU; Blue, Free Soilers, 140–142; Sister M. Theophane Geary, A History of Third Parties in Pennsylvania, 1840–1860 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1938), 127–156; TLK to [Young and other Mormon leaders], 11 July 1850, draft, BYU. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery, 181; TLK to JDK, January 1850, BYU. Wilmot to TLK, 20 January 1850, 10 April 1850, BYU; TLK to Wilmot, n.d. [ca. summer 1851], draft, BYU; TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection. D. G. Skervett to TLK, 6 December 1852, BYU; TLK to JKK, n.d. [ca. January 1849], TLK Papers, APS; TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection. TLK to JDK and JKK, 4 January 1849, TLK Papers, APS; TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection. TLK to Young, 19 February 1851, Young Collection; TLK to JKK, n.d. [ca. January 1849], TLK Papers, APS; TLK, “Africanization,” 33–34, 40–41, BYU. TLK Journal, 1851–52, BYU. Eyal, Young America. Kane never used the term “Young America” or explicitly identi-

308

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

Notes to Pages 102–107 fied with the movement in surviving documents. Nevertheless, his political beliefs and associations strongly suggest his affiliation with Young America. Eyal, Young America; JKK, Autobiography, 48–49; Lilian Handlin, George Bancroft, the Intellectual as Democrat (New York: Harper and Row, 1984); Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). Eyal, Young America; TLK to Brigham Young, 24 September 1850, BYU. Eyal, Young America. Timothy M. Roberts and Daniel W. Howe, “The United States and the Revolutions of 1848,” in R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge Von Strandmann, eds., The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Richard C. Rohrs, “American Critics of the French Revolution of 1848,” Journal of the Early Republic 14.3 (Fall 1994): 359–378; Eyal, Young America, 102; TLK to EKK, 9 April 1848, EKK Papers, APS; TLK to Alida Constable, September 1849, BYU; TLK, “Africanization,” 113, BYU. Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and Foreign Policy, 1848–1852 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977); Michael A. Morrison, “American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848–1852: Sectionalism, Memory, and the Revolutionary Heritage,” Civil War History 49.2 (2003): 111–132. TLK to Sumner, 8 December 1851, 22 December 1851, Sumner Papers, Harvard; J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 702–703; “Movements of Kossuth,” National Era, 1 January 1852. TLK to Wood, 23 December [1851], BYU; TLK Journal, 29 December 1851, undated notes, BYU; “Substantial Aid to Hungary,” National Era, 15 January 1852; Resolutions to the Senate and House of Representatives, draft and printed copy, TLK Papers, APS; TLK et al., “Substantial Aid to Hungary,” printed letter, TLK Papers, APS. TLK to Wood, 10–11 January 1852, BYU. TLK Journal, 15 February 1853, BYU; Eyal, Young America, 136; EWK Journal, 30 May 1854, BYU. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 16–17. Chase to TLK, 9 March 1854, BYU; TLK to Chase, 8 March 1854, Chase Papers, HSP; Wood to TLK, 6 March 1854, BYU. “Anti-Nebraska Meeting,” Public Ledger, 23 March 1854; Chase to TLK, 5 April 1854, BYU; TLK to Chase, 13 April 1854, Chase Papers, HSP; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas. TLK to John W. Forney, 2 June 1854, BYU; C. Albright to TLK, 24 July 1854, TLK Papers, APS; Greeley to TLK, 24 May 1854, BYU. Kane, “Africanization,” 37–39, 47–48, BYU. Kane’s analysis of how poor ethnic immigrants used whiteness to distinguish themselves from blacks foreshadowed contemporary “whiteness” studies, such as Roediger, Wages of Whiteness. Two drafts of this essay exist at BYU. The final draft of 135 manuscript pages is in Elizabeth’s writing and has been polished, suggesting intent to publish. Kane wrote extensively on racial topics, though nearly all of his other writings have not survived. In a

Notes to Pages 108–115

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

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presentation to the American Philosophical Society in 1877, he referred to several previous communications to the society in the 1840s and 1850s on racial issues. TLK, Coahuila (Philadelphia, 1877). William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Towards Race in America, 1815–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 81–126, 170–221. EWK, biographical sketches of TLK, 20 December 1873, n.d. [post-1883], BYU. TLK Journal, 8 February 1853, undated notes, BYU; TLK to RPK, 24 January [1853], APS; TLK to JKK and JDK, 8 February 1853, APS. TLK Journal, undated notes, 22 February 1853, 14 February 1853, BYU. TLK, “Africanization,” BYU. TLK, “Africanization,” BYU. TLK, “Africanization,” BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. TLK, “Africanization,” BYU; Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas, xi. Cannon to Young, 14 April 1859, Young Collection. TLK to John W. Forney, 2 June 1854, BYU; EWK Journal, 28 November 1858, BYU.

C H A P T E R 7. F U G I T I V E S L AV E S 1. JKK to EKK, 31 October 1843, BYU. 2. Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). 3. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 4. Campbell, Slave Catchers, 49–95, 110–147, 199–207. On resistance and rescues, see R. J. M. Blackett, “‘Freemen to the Rescue!’: Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850,” in David W. Blight, ed., Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 2004), 133–148; Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Monique Patenaude Roach, “The Rescue of William ‘Jerry’ Henry: Antislavery and Racism in the Burned-over District,” New York History 82.2 (2001): 135–154. 5. TLK to BK, 27 November [1850], BYU; “Manly,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 3 October 1850 (reprinted in the National Era, a Washington, D.C., antislavery paper, on 10 October 1850). 6. EWK, biographical sketch, 20 December 1873, BYU; “Death of General Kane,” Inquirer, 27 December 1883, Kane Scrapbook, JKK Collection, HSP; EWK, history, 26 November 1868, BYU, 26; Corner, Doctor Kane, 12–13, 279; William Wood to TLK, 23

310

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

Notes to Pages 116–120 January 1851, BYU. On Grier, see Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851, A Documentary Account (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974), 181. Wendell Phillips, Argument of Wendell Phillips, esq., before the Committee on Federal Relations of the Massachusetts Legislature: in support of the petitions for the removal of Edward Greely Loring from the office of Judge of Probate, February 20, 1855 (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton, 1855); EDW to TLK, 13 May 1852, BYU. Charlotte Mires, “Slavery, Nativism, and the Forgotten History of Independence Hall,” Pennsylvania History 67.4 (2000): 492. “More Negro excitement in Philadelphia!” North Star, 31 October 1850; Campbell, Slave Catchers, 97–98; Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 213–214, n. 22. TLK to BK, n.d. [February 1851], BYU; William Still, The Underground Rail Road (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1872; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968), 577– 578. TLK to [Horace Greeley], n.d. [1851], BYU. On the fugitive slaves who appeared before John Kane, see Still, Underground Rail Road; Mires, “Independence Hall”; and Samuel May, The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims (New York: American AntiSlavery Society, 1856). JKK to EKK, 21 April 1851, EKK Papers, APS. Wood to TLK, 17 October 1850, BYU; Slaughter, Bloody Dawn, xi. Katz, Resistance at Christiana, 166–169. TLK to BK, November [1851], Kane Family Papers, Michigan; “Thanksgiving among the ‘Traitors,’” Pennsylvania Freeman, 4 December 1851; Still, Underground Rail Road, 366. “Thanksgiving among the ‘Traitors’”; “Thanksgiving in Prison,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 1 January 1852; clipping, “The Courts: The Christiana Treason Trials,” 7 December 1851, unknown paper, in EWK 1854–56 Journal, BYU; Still, Underground Rail Road, 366. General Meeting Minute Book, Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 1847–1916, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, HSP, 60, 74, 86, 100, 116; Still, Underground Rail Road, 367–368. Pat’s specialty in admiralty law did have bearing on Fugitive Slave Law cases. See John Green, “Autobiography,” 14–16, Library and Archives, U.S. Military Academy. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn, 133. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn, 134–138. “The Trial and the Verdict,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 18 December 1851; Wendell Phillips Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (New York: Century, 1889), 3:352; Sumner to TLK, 27 December 1850, BYU. Nat Brandt with Yanna Kroyt Brandt, In the Shadow of the Civil War: Passmore Williamson and the Rescue of Jane Johnson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). In 2002, Henry Louis Gates Jr. edited and published a nineteenth-century

Notes to Pages 121–124

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

311

manuscript by Hannah Crafts, The Bondwoman’s Narrative (New York: Warner, 2002), describing it as “perhaps the first novel written by any black woman at all” (xxi, quotation from Wheeler on lii). Katherine B. Flynn, a genealogist, has suggested that Hannah Crafts might be a pseudonym for Jane Johnson. See Flynn, “Jane Johnson, Found! But Is She ‘Hannah Crafts’? The Search for the Author of The Bondwoman’s Narrative,” in Gates and Hollis Robbins, eds., In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative (New York: Basic, 2004). For a controversial case involving the Kanes in the years between the Christiana and Passmore Williamson cases, see Julius Yanuck, “The Force Act in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 92.3 (1968): 353–364. Ralph Lowell Eckert, “Antislavery Martyrdom: The Ordeal of Passmore Williamson,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 100.4 (1976): 526; Flynn, “Jane Johnson,” 373; Brandt and Brandt, Williamson. Brandt and Brandt, Williamson, 144–152; EWK Journal, 2 March 1858, BYU. Brandt and Brandt, Williamson, 145. TLK to EWK, 12 November [1855], BYU; Charles Sumner to Passmore Williamson, 11 August 1855, published letter, JKK Legal Papers, APS; Garrison, Garrison, 3:437; New York Daily Tribune, 5 November 1854, 4, in Randall Hudson and James Duram, “The New York Daily Tribune and Passmore Williamson’s Case: A Study in the Use of Northern States’ Rights,” Wichita State University Bulletin (November 1974): 13. Philadelphia Daily Sun, August 1855, in Eckert, “Antislavery Martyrdom”; New York Herald, 13 October 1855, in Corner, Doctor Kane, 225; Morning Chronicle [Portsmouth, New Hampshire], 15 October 1855, in Corner, Doctor Kane, 13; Richard Hildreth, Atrocious Judges: Lives of Judges Infamous as Tools of Tyrants and Instruments of Oppression (New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton and Milligan, 1856); Wainwright, Philadelphia Perspective, 250; John H. Rice to JKK, 24 October [1855], JKK Legal Papers, APS. JKK to George M. Justice, 22 September 1855; JKK to James Murray Mason, 5 August 1855, both in JKK Legal Papers, APS. EWK Journal, 27 July 1855, 28 July 1855, 5 December 1860, 28 September 1855, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. EWK Journal, 31 December 1854, 19 August 1855, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, 9–10, BYU. Rotundo, American Manhood, 31–55. On fears of youthful disorder, see Rodney Hessinger, Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). “Manly,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 3 October 1850; “Thanksgiving among the ‘Traitors,’” Pennsylvania Freeman, 4 December 1851. On reform and gender in antebellum Philadelphia, see Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women. On Garrisonian reform and masculinity, see Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000); Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850–1860,” American Quarterly 45.4 (December 1993): 588–595.

312

Notes to Pages 125–129

33. TLK to T. B. H. Stenhouse, draft, [1872], BYU; Peter L. Thorslev Jr., The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962). On the romantic hero, see also Walter L. Reed, Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Romantic Hero in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). The romantic hero is an exaggerated form of the “romantic self,” which similarly emphasizes individuality, self-sufficiency, and the struggle against society. See Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution, and the Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787–1802 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). The nineteenth-century romantic hero also descended from the eighteenthcentury “man of principle,” who was characterized by “his willingness to act on principle no matter how inconvenient it might be.” See Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90.3 (1985): 560. 34. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, ed. Michael K. Goldberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Heroism,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays: First Series, ed. Joseph Slater, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 143–156; TLK to [Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders], 11 July 1850, draft, BYU. On Kane’s acquaintance with Emerson, see Emerson to Lidian Emerson, 9 January 1854, in Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 4:414–415. On romanticism in nineteenth-century America, see also Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics. 35. Wainwright, Philadelphia Perspective, 390; Brooks, Mormon Frontier, 177. 36. Garrison, Garrison, 283–284, 292; Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 401–406; [George William Curtis], “The Late Colonel Kane,” Harper’s Weekly, 12 January 1884, 19. 37. W. H. Furness, Exercises at the Meeting of the First Congregational Unitarian Society, January 12, 1875, together with the discourse delivered by Rev. W. H. Furness, D.D. (Philadelphia: Sherman, 1875), 29–31; TLK to RPK, n.d., RPK Papers, APS. 38. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, 28, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. 39. William Wood to TLK, 27 March 1852, BYU; Still, Underground Rail Road, 366; EWK, history (and notes by E. Kent Kane), 26 November 1868, 26–28, BYU; RPK, undated manuscript concerning escaped slaves, RPK Papers, APS. For the Underground Railroad, see also William Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967); Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

CHAPTER 8. REFORMING MARRIAGE 1. Claudia L. Bushman, “Mormon Domestic Life in the 1870s: Pandemonium or Arcadia?” in The Collected Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lectures (Logan: Special

Notes to Pages 129–138

2. 3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Collections and Archives, Utah State University, 2005), 93; Wood to EDW, 13 May 1852, BYU. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, BYU. Wood to TLK, 10 February 1852, BYU; EDW to TLK, 23–24 May 1852, 17 July 1852, BYU; “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909, copy at BYU. While Thomas was Elizabeth’s first love, he had courted other women, though his extant writings contain only cryptic references to them. See TLK to Wood, n.d. [ca. 1852], BYU; EWK Journal, 11 December 1861, BYU. TLK to Wood, n.d., 26 March 1852, BYU. EDW to TLK, 26 March 1852, n.d., 23–24 May 1852, 4 December 1852, BYU; TLK to EDW, 22 March 1852, 15 April 1852, BYU. TLK to Wood, 10–11 January 1852, 15 March 1852, 17 March 1852; Wood to TLK, 9 March 1852, 8 April 1852; EDW to TLK, 2–5 May 1852, all at BYU. EDW to TLK, 31 August–2 September 1852, 8 August 1852, 23–24 May 1852, 15–16 May 1852, 21 [September?] 1852, 3–4 June 1852, BYU; TLK to EDW, 22 November 1852, 30–31 May 1852, n.d., BYU. TLK to Wood, 21 May 1852, BYU; EDW to TLK, 28 July 1852, 23 September 1852, BYU; TLK to EDW, 24 September 1852, BYU. TLK to Brigham Young, 18 July 1853, Young Collection; EWK Journal, 31 December 1854, 12 March 1855, BYU. The homes were located at 36 and 38 Girard Street in Philadelphia. EWK Journal, 16 January 1855, 17 April 1855, 10–11 May 1854, BYU. EWK Journal, 5 June 1853, 12 June 1853, 12 July 1853, 16 July 1853, BYU. Wood to TLK, 11 March 1851, 11 February 1850, BYU. EDW to BK, 12 May 1852, Kane Family Papers, Michigan; TLK to EDW, 8 May 1852, BYU; EDW to TLK, 23–24 May 1852, BYU; TLK to EDW, 30–31 May 1852, BYU; TLK to Wood, 12 February 1852, BYU. EDW to TLK, 15–16 May 1852, BYU; EWK Journal, 2 July 1854, 3 June 1855, BYU. EWK Journal, 25 June 1854, BYU; TLK to EWK, 5 December [1853], BYU. EWK Journal, 11 February 1855, BYU; EWK to Charlotte Wood, 30 January–3 February 1856, BYU. EWK Journal, 19 June 1854, 16 December 1855, BYU; EWK to TLK, June 1855 (inside journal), 5 October 1862, BYU. EWK Journal, 27 January 1854, 7 February 1854, 9 February 1854, BYU. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, 34, BYU; EWK Journal, 20 June 1854, 8 March 1856, BYU. EWK, history, 26 November 1868, 35–36, BYU. EKK to JKK, 23 July 1853, EKK Papers, APS; Sawin, Raising Kane. EWK Journal, 5 January 1855, 2 March 1856, 12 March 1856, BYU. EWK Journal, 5 June 1854, 19 March 1855, BYU; EWK to William Wood, 16 January [1856 or 1857], BYU. EWK Journal, 6 July 1856, BYU; Emerson, “Man the Reformer,” in Emerson, Works, 219.

314

Notes to Pages 138–144

25. EWK Journal, 6 May 1854, 16 January 1858, BYU. 26. Cecile Parris Remick, “The House of Refuge in Pennsylvania” (Ed.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1975), 325–326. 27. Caroline Winterer, “Avoiding a ‘Hothouse System of Education’: Nineteenth-Century Early Childhood Education from the Infant Schools to the Kindergartens,” History of Education Quarterly 32.3 (1992): 288–314; John William Jenkins, “Infant Schools and the Development of Public Primary Schools in Selected American Cities Before the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1978); Dean May and Maris A. Vinovskis, “A Ray of Millennial Light: Early Education and Social Reform in the Infant School Movement in Massachusetts, 1826–1840,” in Tamara K. Hareven, Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1977), 62–99. 28. Undated notes in TLK Journal, 1851–1852, BYU; TLK, draft essay, JKK Papers, APS. On the salles d’asile, see Linda L. Clark, review of Jean-Noel Luc, L’Invention du jeune enfant au XIXe siècle: De la salle d’asile à l’école maternelle (Paris: Belin, 1997), in Journal of Social History 34.3 (2001): 715–717. 29. EWK to Rev. Dr. Buckley, draft, 6 March 1906, BYU; undated reference in TLK Journal, 1851–1852, BYU. 30. EWK Journal, 15 June 1854, 20 June 1854, 9 January 1855, 1 February 1855, 14 March 1855, 15 May 1855, BYU. 31. [TLK], Two Letters to a Member of the Board of Controllers of the Public Schools From a Tax Payer (Philadelphia: Crissy and Markley, 1855); EWK Journal, 14 April 1855, BYU. Kane’s authorship of the pamphlet is established in EWK Journal, 28 June 1855. 32. EWK Journal, 28 July 1855, 8 August 1855, 30 September 1855, BYU. On the House of Refuge, see Remick, “House of Refuge”; Robert S. Pickett, House of Refuge: Origins of Juvenile Reform in New York State, 1815–1857 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969); EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. 33. TLK, undated essay in notebook given to him by EKK in October 1839, BYU. 34. TLK, undated essay in notebook given to him by EKK in October 1839, BYU; TLK Diary, 15 January 1858, in Winther, Friend of the Mormons, 70; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. Kane most likely recorded these notes after his first voyage to France, as he references French gender roles. On the Kanes and women’s rights, see Barnes, “Elizabeth D. Kane,” 75–85. 35. EDW to TLK, 15–16 May 1852, 23–24 May 1852, 30 September 1852; TLK to Wood, 21 May 1852; TLK to EDW, 19–21 May 1852, 30–31 May 1852, all at BYU. 36. EDW to TLK, Good Friday [1852], 23–24 May 1852, BYU; H. S. Twycross-Martin, “Sarah Ellis,” in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18:253–256. 37. EWK Journal, 20 January 1854, 7 March 1854, 25 February 1854, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. 38. Wood to TLK, 13 October 1851, BYU; EWK Journal, 25 August 1853, 16 September 1853, BYU. 39. On the school, see Steven J. Peitzman, A New and Untried Course: Woman’s Medical College and Medical College of Pennsylvania, 1850–1998 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rut-

Notes to Pages 144–150

40.

41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

315

gers University Press, 2000); Peitzman, “Why Support a Women’s Medical College? Philadelphia’s Early Male Medical Pro-Feminists,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.3 (2003): 576–599. For the broader context of women’s medical education and practice, see Regina Morantz-Sanchez, Sympathy and Science: Women Physicians in American Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas Neville Bonner, To the Ends of the Earth: Women’s Search for Education in Medicine (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Ellen More, Restoring the Balance: Women Physicians and the Profession of Medicine, 1850–1995 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 192–196, BYU; Robert F. Erickson, “Ann Preston,” in Garraty and Carnes, American National Biography, 17:843– 845. EWK Journal, 2 January 1854, BYU. EWK Journal, 27 January 1855, BYU; EWK, manuscript on settling of Kane, 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 192–196, BYU; “A Distinguished Graduate,” Public Ledger and Daily Transcript, 15 May 1883, JKK Collection, HSP. Elizabeth wrote her “Theory” in her journal after the entry for 11 July 1869, BYU. EWK Journal, 2 March 1860, BYU. EWK Journal, 2 March 1860, 4 April 1860, BYU. TLK to EWK, 6 January 1863, 11 March 1863, BYU; EWK to TLK, 14 January 1863, 16 January 1863, 6 February 1863, BYU.

CHAPTER 9. THE UTAH WAR, ACT I 1. On the Utah War, see William P. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part I: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark, 2008); Todd W. Kerstetter, God’s Country, Uncle Sam’s Land: Faith and Conflict in the American West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002); Donald R. Moorman with Gene Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1992);Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960); MacKinnon, “Loose in the Stacks: A Half-Century with the Utah War and Its Legacy,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 40.1 (2007): 43–81; MacKinnon, “Epilogue to the Utah War: Impact and Legacy,” Journal of Mormon History 29.2 (2003): 186–248; Richard D. Poll and MacKinnon, “Causes of the Utah War Reconsidered,” Journal of Mormon History 20.2 (1994): 16–44; Poll, “Thomas L. Kane.” 2. For instance, David M. Potter’s classic history of the 1850s, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), does not mention the Utah War. After the Civil War, many argued in a conspiratorial vein that southerners in Buchanan’s cabinet, particularly Secretary of War John B. Floyd, used the Utah War to weaken the federal government in preparation for secession, or at the least to divert attention from the fighting over slavery in Kansas. See William MacKinnon, “125 Years of Conspiracy Theories: Origins of the Utah Expedition of 1857–58,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52.3

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

Notes to Pages 150–159 (1984): 212–230, Tyler quotation on 226. For links between the Utah War and the Civil War, especially the experience given to many future officers of both the Union and Confederate armies and the continuing stationing of Union troops in Utah during the Civil War, see MacKinnon, “Epilogue.” TLK to William Wood, 21 May 1852, BYU. TLK 1858 Diary, undated entry, BYU. For the schoolchildren metaphor, see EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU. Bernhisel quoted in James C. Van Dyke to TLK, 28 March 1859, BYU; Young to John Taylor, 8 September 1853, Young Collection. TLK to Franklin Pierce, 3 September 1854, Young Collection. Young to TLK, 30 October 1854, Young Collection; Bernhisel to TLK, 6 January 1855, BYU; TLK to Young, 5 January 1855, BYU. Furniss, Mormon Conflict, 35–45. Furniss, Mormon Conflict, 46–61; Paul H. Peterson, “The Mormon Reformation of 1856–1857: The Rhetoric and the Reality,” Journal of Mormon History 15 (1989): 59–87. Young to TLK, 31 January 1857, 7 January 1857, TLK Collection, Yale; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 73–77. Chapin, Exploring Other Worlds, 190–198. EWK Journal, 13 April 1857, 2 May 1857, BYU. John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1908–1911), 2:178–179, 6:77, 6:69; TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 123. Gordon, Mormon Question, 60–61; Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 79. TLK to Buchanan, 21 March 1857, BYU; John Taylor to Young, 18 April 1857, Young Collection; William Appleby to Young, 1 April 1857, Young Collection; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 111–119. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 119; “Col. Thomas L. Kane on Mormonism,” New York Daily Times, 26 May 1857, 1. Kane bitterly wrote on the top of his copy of his 21 March 1857 letter to Buchanan: “Acknowledged by Letter in N.Y. Times.” See TLK to Buchanan, 21 March 1857, BYU. William MacKinnon, “And the War Came: James Buchanan, the Utah Expedition, and the Decision to Intervene,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2008): 22–37; Poll and MacKinnon, “Causes”; Gordon, Mormon Question, 59–62. TLK to Young, 21 May 1857, Young Collection. Furniss stated without documentary support that Cumming won the position, in part, through Kane’s endorsement, an assertion repeated by numerous secondary sources. Furniss, Mormon Conflict, 96. On Cumming, see Leonard J. Arrington, “Alfred Cumming,” in Garraty and Carnes, American National Biography, 5:847–848. Young to TLK, 29 June 1857, TLK Collection, Yale. Warnings of Buchanan’s decision first arrived in Utah on May 29, with John M. Bernhisel and George A. Smith, and (along with Kane’s letter) with the arrival of mail and reports of military activity against the Saints on June 23. Everett L. Cooley, ed., Diary of Brigham Young, 1857 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Library Tanner Trust

Notes to Pages 159–164

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

317

Fund, 1980), 29. The origins of the Mountain Meadows Massacre have long been hotly debated. In Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard present compelling evidence that plans for the massacre originated among local church and militia leaders in southern Utah. In her landmark study, Juanita Brooks argued that Brigham Young was not directly responsible for the massacre but that his fiery rhetoric, along with that of Apostle George A. Smith, created the climate that allowed it to occur; see Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950). By contrast, Bagley forcibly asserts that Young ordered the massacre; see Bagley, Blood of the Prophets (Kimball quotation on 80–81). For the larger context of violence against outsiders in Utah at this time, see Polly Aird, “‘You Nasty Apostates, Clear Out’: Reasons for Disaffection in the Late 1850s,” Journal of Mormon History 30.2 (2004): 129–207; Ardis E. Parshall, “‘Pursue, Retake & Punish’: The 1857 Santa Clara Ambush,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73.1 (2005): 64–86; William MacKinnon, “‘Lonely Bones’: Leadership and the Utah War Violence,” Journal of Mormon History 33 (Spring 2007): 121–178. Poll and MacKinnon, “Causes,” 18–19. EWK Journal, 3 October 1857, BYU; TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 120; Samuel W. Richards to TLK, 16 September 1857, TLK Collection, Yale. Young to TLK, 12 September 1857; Young to Jeter Clinton, 12 September 1857, both in Young Collection; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 278–285. TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 120; EWK Journal, 26 October 1857, BYU; JKK Jr. to Family, 21 January 1858, JKK Papers, APS; Wood, Autobiography, 325; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU. EWK Journal, 24 December 1857, BYU; Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Van Dyke to Buchanan, 9 December 1857, Buchanan Papers, HSP; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 486–487. Poll speculated that Kane may have composed this letter, which reads like a formal letter of introduction. Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 122. EWK Journal, 24 December 1857, BYU; James C. Van Dyke to TLK, 28 March 1859, BYU. Bernhisel quoted in Van Dyke to TLK, 28 March 1859, BYU. TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 123; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 494–499. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; TLK, “Concerning the Mormons and Pres. Buchanan,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 123. Buchanan to TLK, 31 December 1857, BYU; Van Dyke to Buchanan, 29 December 1857, Buchanan Papers, HSP; MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 500–509. Buchanan’s last two letters were published in Moore, Works of James Buchanan, 10:167–169. JKK to TLK, 4 January 1858, BYU; John B. Floyd to Lazarus Powell and Ben Mc-

318

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

Notes to Pages 164–171 Culloch, 12 April 1858, House Executive Documents, 35th Congress, 2nd Session, 2:160–162, in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 509. JKK Jr. to Family, 7 January 1857 [1858], 21 January 1858, JKK Papers, APS. EWK Journal, 28 December 1857, 30 December 1857, BYU. This Bible, which contains notations Kane made during the Utah War, is at BYU. Kane marked certain dates on his Utah War journey by scriptural passages, mostly drawn from the New Testament. For instance, on April 13, 1858, as he witnessed the Move South, he marked Matthew 10:23: “But when they persecute you in this city, flee ye into another.” EWK Journal, 26 January 1858; TLK to EWK, [December 1857], in back of EWK Journal, 1858–1860, BYU. TLK to JKK and RPK, n.d. [ca. April 1858], BYU; EWK Journal, 15 February 1858, BYU; TLK Journal, undated entry, Stanford. TLK Journal, 28–29 January 1858, Stanford. Walter Murray Gibson, to Brigham Young, 16 February 1861, Young Collection; Ebenezer Hanks to Amasa Lyman, 6 February 1858, BYU; EWK Journal, 21 June 1858, BYU. On San Bernardino, see Edward Leo Lyman, San Bernardino: The Rise and Fall of a California Community (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1996). The term “Josephite” Mormons referred to followers of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now called the Community of Christ. TLK to JKK and RPK, n.d. [ca. April 1858], BYU; TLK to RPK, 4 April 1858, BYU; EWK Journal, 21 June 1858, BYU; Francis Jessie Clark to EWK, 2 May 1858, pasted in EWK Journal, BYU; “Translation of Cipher to Judge Kane,” 4 February 1858, TLK Collection, Yale. Amasa Lyman Journal, 12–13 February 1858, Amasa Lyman Collection, LDSCA; Roberts, Comprehensive History, 4:343–344; New York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 22 June 1858. A. Osborn [TLK] to Young, 19 February 1858, Young Collection; TLK to Buchanan, 5 March 1858, BYU. Young to TLK, 25 February 1858, BYU; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:168–170, entry for 25 February 1858; TLK to Buchanan, 5 March 1858, BYU. TLK, undated manuscript, TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 127; TLK to JKK, 5 March 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:208–209, entry for 15 August 1858. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:168–170, entry for 25 February 1858; George A. Smith to William H. Dame, 3 February [March] 1858, William H. Dame Papers, BYU. TLK to RPK, n.d., TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 127; Roberts, Comprehensive History, 4:346; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:171, 5:208–209, entries for 27 February 1858 and 15 August 1858; Historian’s Office Journal, LDSCA, transcript in Cook Collection, BYU. Staines’s mansion is now known as the Devereaux House. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, entry for 4 March 1858; TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU. TLK to [Buchanan], 4 March 1858, BYU. Young apparently helped compose this letter, as Kane called it “the joint composition of an eccentric great man and myself.” TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU.

Notes to Pages 171–178

319

49. EWK Journal, 30 December 1857, 1 March 1858, 2 February 1858, 5 February 1858, 10 January 1858, BYU. 50. EWK Journal, 17–19 February 1858, 5 June 1858, 11 June 1858, BYU. 51. EWK Journal, 19 February 1858, 28 February 1858, 20 April 1858, 2 May 1858, 4 April 1858, 28 March 1858, BYU. 52. EWK Journal, 28 January 1858, 31 January 1858, 11 April 1858, BYU. 53. EWK Journal, 3 February 1858, 22 April 1858, 15 February 1858, 7 March 1858, 1 May 1858, 16 April 1858, 12–14 May 1858, 30 May 1858, BYU.

CHAPTER 10. THE UTAH WAR, ACT II 1. Brooks, Mormon Frontier, 2:653. Rockwell, who had served as a bodyguard to Joseph Smith, earned national fame as a gunfighter who allegedly punished the enemies of Mormonism as a “Destroying Angel.” 2. David L. Bigler, Fort Limhi: The Mormon Adventure in Oregon Territory, 1855–1858 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003). 3. TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU; Bigler, Fort Limhi. 4. TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU; Young to TLK, 9 March 1858, BYU. 5. TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU; Jacob Forney to Jeremiah Black, 9 March 1858, Jeremiah Black Papers, LOC; Gove to Family, 30 September 1857, in Hammond, Utah Expedition, 68; Furniss, Mormon Conflict, 116. 6. “Highly Important from Utah: Arrival of Col. Kane at Ft. Bridger,” New York SemiWeekly Tribune, 25 May 1858. 7. John Wolcott Phelps, Diary, 13 March 1858, New York Public Library, microfilm copy at LDSCA; “Extracts from the Diary of Maj. Fitz-John Porter, A.A.G. while acting with Genl. Albert Sidney Johnston in the Utah Expedition,” 13 March 1858, Fitz-John Porter Papers, LOC (hereafter Porter Diary). 8. “Highly Important from Utah: Arrival of Col. Kane at Ft. Bridger,” New York SemiWeekly Tribune, 25 May 1858; Gove to Family, 14–24 March 1858, Gove to New York Herald, 10 April 1858, in Hammond, Utah Expedition, 134, 205; Henry Hamilton, Reminiscences of a Veteran (Concord, N.H.: Republican Press Association, 1897), 98– 99. Eckels, who later clashed with Kane and became an inveterate foe of Mormon power, initially sympathized with his mission. Porter Diary, 15 March 1858, LOC. 9. Cuvier Grover to Porter, 16 March 1858, Duke, microfilm copy at the University of Utah; Porter Diary, 13 March 1858, LOC; William Preston Johnston, Life of Andrew S Johnston The Life of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston (New York: D. Appleton, 1880; reprint, Austin, Tex.: State House Press, 1997), 225; Albert G. Browne, “The Utah Expedition: Its Causes and Consequences,” Atlantic Monthly (March–May 1859), 480– 481. Browne’s information was secondhand, as he was then absent from Camp Scott; see MacKinnon, “Epilogue,” 225. See also Matthew J. Grow, “‘I Have Given Myself to the Devil’: Thomas L. Kane and the Culture of Honor,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73 (Fall 2005): 345–364. 10. TLK to Johnston, 13 March 1858, 16 March 1858, BYU. 11. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York: Oxford Uni-

320

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Notes to Pages 179–185 versity Press, 1986), 148–149; Ray R. Canning and Beverly Beeton, eds., The Genteel Gentile: Letters of Elizabeth Cumming, 1857–1858 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Library, 1977), xii. Cumming’s position is unclear. Kane’s papers seem to indicate that Cumming declined to serve as Kane’s second; however, Porter claimed that Cumming instigated Kane’s challenge. Porter Diary, 13 March 1858, LOC. TLK, “A Memorandum of the Reasons which have occasioned the delivery of a personal communication from Mr. Kane to Colonel Johnston to be delayed,” read to Porter by TLK on 16 March 1858, BYU; Johnston to Cumming, 17 March 1858, Cumming Papers, Duke; Porter to Johnston, 17 March 1858, Cumming Papers, Duke; Johnston to TLK, 17 March 1858, BYU. TLK to JKK and RPK, [ca. April 1858], BYU; TLK to RPK, 4 April 1858, BYU; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” 98, BYU. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” 98, BYU. TLK to Johnston, 14 March 1858, 16 March 1858, BYU; Porter Diary, 16 March 1858, LOC. TLK to Young, draft, 16 March 1858, BYU. Brooks, Mormon Frontier, 2:655; Gene A. Sessions and Stephen W. Stathis, “The Mormon Invasion of Russian America: Dynamics of a Potent Myth,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45.1 (1977): 22–35; Bennett and Jewsbury, “The Lion and the Emperor,” 37–62; Clifford L. Stott, Search for Sanctuary: Brigham Young and the White Mountain Expedition (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1984). Richard D. Poll, “The Move South,” BYU Studies 29.4 (1989): 65–88, quotation on 68. “Highly Important from Utah: Arrival of Col. Kane at Ft. Bridger,” New York SemiWeekly Tribune, 25 May 1858; Hammond, Utah Expedition, 135–136; Porter Diary, 17 March 1858, 20 March 1858, LOC; Hamilton, Reminiscences, 98–99; Robert E. Stowers and John M. Ellis, “Charles A. Scott’s Diary of the Utah Expedition, 1857– 1861,” Utah Historical Quarterly 28 (April 1960): 169–170, entry for 18 March 1858. TLK to Buchanan, [ca. 15 March 1858], BYU. Elizabeth Cumming to Anne, 5 April 1858, in Canning and Beeton, Genteel Gentile, 33–35. Browne, “Utah Expedition,” 484. TLK to Buchanan, 4 April 1858, BYU; Jacob Forney to Jeremiah Black, 18 April 1858, Black Papers, LOC; TLK Diary, undated entry, Stanford; TLK, statement, TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 130–131; Cumming to Lewis Cass, 24 March 1858, Cumming Papers, Duke. TLK to EWK, 24 March 1858, BYU. TLK to Buchanan, draft?, 23 March 1858, BYU; TLK to RPK, 4 April 1858, BYU. RPK read this letter to Buchanan. TLK to JKK, [4 April 1858], BYU; TLK Diary, undated entry, Stanford; TLK to Buchanan, 4 April 1854, BYU; Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 129–130. Porter Diary, 2 April 1858, LOC; TLK Diary, undated entry, Stanford. Gove to Family, 4 April 1858, in Hammond, Utah Expedition, 141; Jacob Forney to Jeremiah Black, 18 April 1858, Black Papers, LOC.

Notes to Pages 186–192

321

29. Porter Diary, 6 April 1858, 9 April 1858, LOC; Elizabeth Cumming to Anne, 22 April 1858, 28 May 1858, in Canning and Beeton, Genteel Gentile, 46–47, 58–59. 30. TLK to JKK, 4 April 1858, BYU; TLK to RPK, 4 April 1858, BYU; TLK to Buchanan, 4 April 1858, BYU. 31. TLK to JKK, [4 April 1858], BYU. 32. TLK to EWK, 5 April 1858, BYU; TLK Diary, undated entry, ca. 5 April 1858, Stanford; TLK to RPK, 4 April 1858, BYU. 33. Elizabeth Cumming to Anne, 22 April 1858, in Canning and Beeton, Genteel Gentile, 46–50; David Candland Journal, 6–7 April 1858, LDSCA, in Canning and Beeton, Genteel Gentile, 49; Historian’s Office Journal, 13 April 1858, LDSCA, transcript in Cook Collection, BYU. 34. Cumming to Johnston, 15 April 1858, Cumming Papers, Duke; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:181, entry for 12 April 1858. 35. TLK Diary, Stanford; “Journal History,” 13–14 April 1855; Cumming to Johnston, 15 April 1858, Cumming Papers, Duke. 36. Brooks, Mormon Frontier, 2:657, entry for 19 April 1858; TLK to Family, 18 April 1858, in EWK Journal, 19 June 1858, BYU; TLK Diary, undated entry, Stanford. 37. Cumming to [Lewis Cass], 2 May 1858, BYU (also in Cumming Papers, Duke); Cumming to James L. Orr, 12 May 1858, BYU. A note at the bottom of the letter to Orr states that it arrived at Buchanan’s desk. See also [Cumming] to Lewis Cass, 11 May 1858, draft in TLK’s handwriting, BYU; copy dated May 12 in Cumming Papers, Duke. 38. Daniel H. Wells to Young, 1 May 1858, Young Collection; Thomas Bullock Journal, May–June 1858, BYU, in Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 210. 39. TLK to family, 18 April 1858, in EWK Journal, 19 June 1858, BYU; TLK, “Concerning the Mormons,” TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Move South,” 70. 40. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; Young to TLK, 8 May 1858, Young Collection. 41. Daniel H. Wells to Young, 17 May 1858, Young Collection; Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 131; Thomas Bullock, letter to editor, 27 May 1858, in Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, 20 (24 July 1858):476. Lafayette Shaw (Fay) Worthen, a non-Mormon and son of the Illinois state geologist, also accompanied Kane’s group, having spent the winter in Salt Lake City. MacKinnon, “Epilogue,” 244–245. 42. Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 205–207; Young to TLK, 10 September 1858, Young Collection. 43. Eleanor McComb [Pratt] to TLK, 7 May 1858; William Phelps to TLK, 26 April 1858; Eliza R. Snow to TLK, 6 March 1858; Josephine Richards to [TLK], n.d. [ca. April/ May 1858], all at BYU. Pratt was murdered in Arkansas during the lead-up to the Utah War in May 1857. 44. George A. Smith to TLK, 11 September 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Young to TLK, 22 November 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:190, entry for 25 May 1858. 45. EWK Journal, 10 April 1858, 12 April 1858, 16 April 1858, 21 April 1858, BYU; John Bernhisel to RPK, 29 June 1858, BYU; “A Visit to San Bernardino,” newspaper clipping, Stanford.

322

Notes to Pages 192–199

46. “End of the Mormon Rebellion!” St. Louis Republican, 17 May 1858, newspaper clipping, Cumming Papers, Duke; EWK Journal, 18 May 1858, 20 May 1858, BYU; New York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 22 June 1858. 47. EWK Journal, 20 May 1858, 26 May 1858, BYU; “Col. Thomas L. Kane,” New York Times, 22 May 1858; “Colonel Kane and the Nature of his Mission,” New York Times, clipping at BYU. 48. “Special Correspondent,” 28 May 1858, Camp Scott, in New York Times, clipping, Cumming Papers, Duke; E. C. Craig to Buchanan, 1 June 1858, Buchanan Papers, HSP; New York Herald, 20 June 1858. 49. “From Fort Laramie,” St. Louis Republican, June 1858, Cumming Scrapbook, Duke. 50. EWK Journal, 20 June 1858, 11 July 1858, BYU; Barnes, “Elizabeth D. Kane,” 71–74. 51. EWK Journal, 20 May 1858, 20 June 1858, BYU. 52. EWK Journal, 20 June 1858, BYU; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; Washington Union, 8 July 1858, copy in Cumming Scrapbook, Duke. On Kane’s advice to Buchanan, see TLK to Buchanan, n.d. [ca. summer 1858], typescript, Leonard J. Arrington Papers, Special Collections, Utah State University. 53. Bernhisel to Young, 2 July 1858, 8 July 1858, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 25 August 1858, draft, TLK Collection, Yale; Young to TLK, 10 September 1858, 22 October 1858, 29 October 1858, Young Collection. Kane pressed unsuccessfully for Eckels’s removal in the coming months, even using charges of sexual immorality to sully Eckels’s reputation. See Eckels to Lt. Bennett, 12 August 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; MacKinnon, “Epilogue,” 245. On Wilson, see Young to TLK, 22 November 1858, 17 September 1859, Young Collection. 54. EWK Journal, 4–10 July 1858, 15 July 1858, 24 July 1858, 30 July 1858, BYU; TLK to Young, 25 August 1858, 24 July 1859, Young Collection. 55. Bernhisel to Young, 8 July 1858, Young Collection; EWK to Jeremiah Black, 3 July 1858, BYU; Black to EWK, 7 July 1858, BYU; TLK to Black, 20 July 1858, BYU; Black to TLK, 26 July 1858, 29 July 1858, 16 August 1858, BYU; Notes, 18 July 1858, Young Collection, probably carried by Howard Egan to Young. 56. TLK to Young, 18 July 1858, Young Collection; Notes, 18 July 1858, Young Collection. 57. George A. Smith to TLK, 11 September 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Young to George Q. Cannon, 21 November 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Young to Horace S. Eldredge, 29 November 1858, TLK Collection, Yale; Young to TLK, 22 November 1858, 10 September 1858, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 6 August 1858, TLK Collection, Yale. 58. Young to TLK, 1 September 1858, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 25 April 1860, Young Collection. 59. Cannon to Young, 14 April 1859, Young Collection; Young to Cannon, 24 December 1858, Yale; Davis Bitton, George Q. Cannon: A Biography (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1999), 94–99. 60. Young to Bernhisel, 20 October 1858, Young Collection; Bernhisel to Young, 11 December 1858, 28 February 1859, Young Collection; Cannon to Young, 18 March 1859, 14 April 1859, Young Collection. 61. Young to TLK, 15 December 1859, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 25 August 1858,

Notes to Pages 199–208

62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

323

draft, TLK Collection, Yale; Cannon to Young, 14 April 1859, Young Collection; EWK Journal, 13 March 1859, 27 February 1859, BYU. “The Executive of Utah, Lecture By Col. Thomas J. [sic] Kane,” New York Times, 23 March 1859; Cannon to Young, 6 April 1859, Young Collection. Cannon to Young, 18 March 1859, 6 April 1859, 14 April 1859, 23 April 1859, Young Collection; TLK to Cumming, undated draft [ca. 22 March 1859], TLK Collection, Yale; Zobell, Sentinel, 175; Bitton, Cannon, 98. Eli K. Price, Henry Wharton, et al., to TLK, 8 July 1858, BYU; TLK to Price, 16 July 1858, BYU; Price to TLK, 26 July 1858, BYU; TLK to Buchanan, 20 July 1858, BYU; “The News,” The Press, 20 July 1858. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; EWK Journal, 29 July 1858, BYU; TLK to RPK, n.d., TLK Papers, APS, in Poll, “Thomas L. Kane,” 135. EWK Journal, 28 November 1858, 18 June 1858, 10 December 1858, BYU; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; Buchanan, Second Annual Message, 6 December 1858, in Moore, Works of James Buchanan, 10:245. EWK Journal, 10 December 1858, BYU; Young to TLK, 12 May 1858, BYU; Daniel H. Wells to Bernhisel, 12 May 1858, Young Collection. TLK 1858 Diary, undated entry, BYU; Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 198. It is unclear whether Kane met Kanosh on his way to Salt Lake City in February 1858 or after his return from Camp Scott in April/May 1858. On Young’s reaction, see Thomas G. Alexander, Brigham Young, The Quorum of the Twelve, and the Latter-day Saint Investigation of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2007). Alexander, Latter-day Saint Investigation; Young to TLK, 3 May 1859, 17 September 1859, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 24 July 1859, Young Collection. For an alternative view, which asserts that Young covered up the massacre and obstructed the federal investigations, see Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 235–236. TLK to Black, 1 November 1859, Black Papers, LOC. TLK to Young, 24 July 1859, Young Collection; Cannon to Young, 13 December 1859, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 15 December 1859, BYU; TLK to Black, 15 January 1860, Black Papers, LOC. Alexander, Latter-day Saint Investigation. TLK to James Mason, 20 April 1860, Buchanan Papers, HSP. Cannon to Young, 26 March 1860, Young Collection, in Bitton, Cannon, 98; TLK to Young, 10 August 1860, Young Collection. Young to TLK, 21 September 1861, Young Collection.

CHAPTER 11. HONOR, REFORM, AND WAR 1. Foner, Free Soil. 2. EWK to TLK, 17 May 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 19 May 1861, BYU. 3. On the culture of honor, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence; Wyatt-Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and

324

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

Notes to Pages 208–212 War, 1760s–1890s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Kenneth Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Oliver Stevens, Pistols at Ten Paces: The Story of the Code of Honor in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1940); Dick Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000); Bushman, Refinement of America. William D. Wilkins to TLK, 16 March 1863, BYU; James Langstaff Dunn to wife, 12 April 1863, James Langstaff Dunn Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library; Williams to Daughter, 28 October 1862, in Milo M. Quaife, ed., From the Cannon’s Mouth: The Civil War Letters of General Alpheus S. Williams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959), 141; TLK to EWK, 13 March 1863, 7 November 1861, 1 April 1863, BYU. TLK to EKK, 10 June [1841?], EKK Papers, APS; Sawin, “Heroic Ambition”; E. Kent Kane (TLK’s grandson) to George Corner, 8 October 1969, BYU. Twain quoted in Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanticism and Nationalism in the Old South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1949), 49–52; Paul Christopher Anderson, Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 31; William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). Kane thought highly of Scott’s novels and asked his daughter to read from Scott’s Rob Roy (about Robert Roy MacGregor, the Scottish Robin Hood) on his deathbed. Harriet A. Kane Diary, 26 December 1883, BYU. Anderson, Blood Image, 31; Alpheus Williams to TLK, 4 March 1868; EWK, sketch of TLK’s involvement in the Civil War, n.d.; Frank Bell, “Rhymes of the Bucktails,” enclosed with TLK to EWK, 12 April 1863, all at BYU. TLK to EWK, 22–24 July 1861, 13 December 1861, 12 January 1862, 5 May 1863, BYU; EWK to TLK, 2 June 1861, 28–31 July 1861, 16 December 1861, 18–19 January 1862, BYU. Though largely forgotten, Sintram was “well-known and loved by the Victorians.” Terri Witek, “How Robert Shaw Became Robert Lowell in ‘For the Union Dead’: The Sculpture of August Saint-Gaudens, the Engravings of Albrecht Durer, and the Writings of Robert Lowell,” Cortland Review (Winter 2002), online: http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/02/12/witek.html. EWK, “Civil War Information,” BYU; EWK Journal, 5 December 1860, BYU. EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU; “The Union and the Constitution,” M’Kean County Democrat—Extra, 19 April 1861; TLK to Col. A. J. Wilcox, 30 September 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 11 September 1861, BYU; TLK, speech draft to Brigade, n.d., BYU; TLK to JDK, 11 May 1862, TLK Papers, APS. TLK to EWK, 22–24 July 1861, BYU; TLK to Harriet Kane, n.d., BYU; TLK, responses to undated interview following the Civil War, BYU; EWK, account of Ulysses Grant’s visit, 1869, BYU; Cannon Journal, 10 June 1882, transcript, private possession. The original Cannon journal is owned by the LDS Church, but access to it is restricted.

Notes to Pages 213–217

325

13. “From Harrisburg,” The Patriot and Union [Harrisburg], 25 May 1861, BYU. For regimental histories, see Samuel P. Bates, History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861– 1865 (Harrisburg, Pa.: State Printer, 1869), 1:907–943; O. R. Howard Thomson and William H. Rauch, History of the “Bucktails,” Kane Rifle Regiment of the Pennsylvania Reserve Corps (Philadelphia: Electric Printing, 1906); Edwin A. Glover, Bucktailed Wildcats: A Regiment of Civil War Volunteers (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1960); John D. Imhof, “Two Roads to Gettysburg: Thomas Leiper Kane and the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves,” Gettysburg Magazine 9 (July 1993): 53–60; William J. Miller, “Bucktail Summer,” Civil War 63 (August 1997): 34–41; Patrick A. Schroeder, Pennsylvania Bucktails: A Photographic Album of the 42nd, 149th, and 150th Pennsylvania Regiments (Daleville, Va.: Schroeder, 2001). 14. EWK Journal, 28 April 1861, BYU; EWK to TLK, 21 April 1861, BYU; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU. 15. TLK to Major Charles Biddle, 7 June 1861, BYU; “Magnanimity,” newspaper clipping, n.d., BYU; “Col. Thomas L. Kane,” Patriot and Union, 14 June 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 30 June 1861, BYU; TLK to Ann Thomas, 26 July 1861, BYU. Biddle had served with Kane on a committee in 1852 to raise support and donations for the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth. See TLK et al., “Substantial Aid to Hungary,” printed letter, TLK Papers, APS. 16. TLK to EWK, 16 September 1861, BYU; Wainwright, Philadelphia Perspective, 395; JDK to TLK, 1 October 1861, BYU; TLK to Salmon P. Chase, draft, 7 January 1862, BYU. 17. EWK to TLK, 7 December 1861, 3 September 1861, BYU. 18. Anderson, Blood Image, 128; TLK to EWK, 26 July 1861, BYU. See also Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991). 19. Kane outlined his differences with Biddle most fully in an undated manuscript at BYU. His allegations are partially given credence by the existence of a letter from Brigham Young to Kane in Biddle’s papers, which Biddle apparently either intercepted or failed to deliver to Kane. See Young to TLK, 21 September 1861, Charles J. Biddle Papers, Biddle Family Papers, HSP. On the West Virginia fighting, see Fritz Haselberger and Mark Haselberger, “The Skirmishes at New Creek and Piedmont,” West Virginia History 27.3 (1966): 211–219. 20. TLK to EWK, 24 November 1861, 3 December 1861, BYU; Charles F. Taylor to Sister, 6 December 1861, 10 June 1861, in Charles F. Hobson and Arnold Shankman, “Colonel of the Bucktails: Civil War Letters of Charles Frederick Taylor,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97.3 (1973): 333–361; RPK to Biddle, 4 December 1861, BYU; Biddle to RPK, 5 December 1861, BYU; RPK to TLK, 6 December 1861, BYU; EWK to TLK, 7 December 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 10 December 1861, BYU. 21. Ben A. Riley, “The Pryor-Potter Affair: Nineteenth-Century Civilian Conflict as Precursor to Civil War,” Journal of the West Virginia Historical Association 8.1 (1984): 29– 39; Joseph P. Fried, “How One Union General Murdered Another,” Civil War Times Illustrated 1.3 (1962): 14–16; EWK to TLK, 2 October 1862, BYU. 22. EWK Journal, 13 December 1861; EWK to TLK, 2 June 1861, both at BYU.

326

Notes to Pages 217–223

23. EWK Journal, 14 December 1861; EWK to TLK, 15 December 1861, 16 December 1861, 19–21 December 1861, all at BYU. 24. TLK to George Bayard, 13 December 1861, BYU; TLK to Biddle, 17 December 1861, 19 December 1861, BYU; Biddle to Captain McPherson, 20 December 1861, Biddle Papers, HSP; Biddle’s note on TLK to Biddle, 17 December 1861, Biddle Papers, HSP; EWK Journal, 19 January 1862, BYU. Fort Lafayette was an imposing military prison in New York often called the American Bastille. 25. Bayard to TLK, 21 December 1861, BYU; TLK to Simon Cameron, 23 December 1861, BYU. For favorable press reactions on Dranesville, see newspaper clippings in EWK, “Civil War Information,” BYU. 26. TLK to Simon Cameron, 23 December 1861, BYU; Hugh W. McNeil to Marion, 27 January 1862, Hugh W. McNeil Collection, Pennsylvania State Archives (hereafter McNeil Papers); EWK to TLK, 22 December 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 23 December 1861, BYU. 27. EWK Journal, 28 December 1861, BYU. 28. Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Knopf, 1997); EWK Journal, 26–28 December 1861, BYU; TLK to EWK, 5 January 1862, BYU. 29. EWK to TLK, 18–19 January 1862, 5 January 1862, 21 January 1862, BYU; TLK to EWK, 14 January 1862, BYU. 30. Miller, “Bucktail Summer”; William A. Holland, “The Old Bucktails—Their History,” Duncannon Record, 24 August 1988; McNeil to sister, 23 December 1861, 2 January 1861 [1862], McNeil Papers; “From the Bucktails,” letter from Camp Pierpont, 26 January 1862, Agitator, clipping in McNeil Papers. 31. EWK to TLK, 23 January 1862, 28 January 1862, 30 January 1862, BYU; TLK to McClellan, 31 January 1862, BYU. 32. TLK to EWK, n.d. [ca. 11 February 1862], 23 March 1862, BYU; TLK to McClellan, 16 February 1862, 6 March 1862, BYU; TLK to Brigadier General Casey, 1 March 1862, BYU; Miller, “Skirmish Line”; TLK to Stanton, draft, 10 March 1862, BYU. 33. TLK to Ann Thomas, 22 March 1862, 9 February 1863, BYU; TLK to JDK, 11 May 1862, TLK Papers, APS; Alpheus Williams to Jule Allen, 16 February 1863, in Quaife, From the Cannon’s Mouth, 165. 34. TLK to JDK, 11 May 1862, TLK Papers, APS. 35. Anderson, Blood Image. 36. Glover, Bucktailed Wildcats, 114–119; TLK Pension Claim, 10 November 1883, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Meade to wife, 11 June 1862, in George Meade, ed., The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade, Major-General United States Army (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 273. Kane family tradition held that the assailant was a cousin of Kane’s in the Confederate Army. See EWK, A Gentile Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie, 1872–73: Elizabeth Kane’s St. George Journal, ed. Norman R. Bowen (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Library, Tanner Trust Fund, 1995), 173. 37. Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall: Being Chiefly the War Experiences of the Youngest Member of Jackson’s Staff from the John Brown Raid to the Hanging of

Notes to Pages 223–230

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

327

Mrs. Surratt (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 80–81; TLK, response to interview, BYU. Taylor to Bayard Taylor, 8 July 1862, in Hobson and Shankman, “Colonel of the Bucktails”; document, signed by S. Mitchell, 21 July 1862, BYU. EWK Journal, 14–22 June 1862, BYU; EWK to TLK, 11 February 1862, BYU. TLK to Lincoln, draft, summer 1862, BYU; EWK, sketch of TLK’s involvement in Civil War, n.d., BYU; TLK to EWK, 13 March 1863, BYU. TLK to Stanton, 23 July 1862, draft, BYU. TLK to RPK, n.d. [ca. August 1862], BYU; TLK to War Department, n.d., draft, BYU; TLK, statement on “Bucktail Brigade,” BYU; TLK to Eli Slifer, 12 August 1862, BYU; TLK to Stanton, 13 August 1862, draft, BYU. Miller, “Bucktail Summer”; EWK to TLK, 22 August 1862, 29 August 1862, BYU. TLK to EWK, n.d. [ca. January 1863]; TLK to General Cullum, 5 January 1863; TLK to Stanton, 5 January 1863; TLK to Joseph Hooker, 3 February 1863, all at BYU. McKean Miner, undated clipping in EWK to TLK, 1 November 1862; EWK to TLK, 24 April 1862, 4 September 1862, 22 October 1862; TLK to EWK, 26 April 1862, 19 April 1863, 15 January 1863, all at BYU. TLK to EWK, 7 February 1863, 14 February 1863; EWK to TLK, 10 February 1863, all at BYU. TLK to EWK, 13 October 1861, BYU; TLK to Captains of the Brigade, n.d., BYU; Peter Rothermel to TLK, 8 February 1874, BYU. TLK to EWK, 13 March 1863, BYU; TLK to Lincoln, 18 March 1863, Abraham Lincoln Papers, LOC; EWK Journal, 10 March 1863, BYU; EWK to TLK, 23 March 1863, 25 March 1863, BYU. EWK to TLK, 28 February 1863; EWK Journal, 1 March 1863; TLK to John W. Forney, 12 March 1863; TLK to Lincoln, 18 March 1863, all at BYU. TLK to Stanton, 7 April 1863; TLK to EWK, 1 April 1863, 12 April 1863, 15 April 1863, all at BYU. TLK to Slocum, 31 March 1863, BYU; James T. Miller to Brother, 28 March 1863, in Jedediah Mannis and Galen R. Wilson, eds., Bound to Be a Soldier: The Letters of Private James T. Miller, 111th Pennsylvania Infantry, 1861–1864 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), 65; TLK to EWK, 1 April 1863, BYU. TLK to Harriet Kane, 15 April 1863, BYU; TLK to Elisha Kane, 15 April 1863, BYU. TLK to EWK, 3–4 May 1863, 5 May 1863, BYU; New York Herald, 4 May 1863, 8, BYU; Report of Brig. Gen. John W. Geary, 10 May 1863, in The War of Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), series 1, 25:729. EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU; James L. Dunn to wife, 12 April 1863, James Langstaff Dunn Papers, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library; Surgeon J. Nutty to Lt. Col. Rodgers, 7 May 1863, BYU; Statement of Surgeon J. L. Dunn, 7 May 1863, BYU; EWK Journal, 8 June 1863, BYU. EWK Journal, 8 June 1863, 16 June 1863; EWK to TLK, 14 June 1863; TLK to EWK, 29 June 1863; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” all at BYU; John Bakeless, Spies of the

328

56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64.

Notes to Pages 231–238 Confederacy (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 312; EWK to J. W. Weidermeyer, 23 September 1887, in EWK, “Civil War Information,” BYU; TLK to EWK, 2 July 1863, BYU. A. Wilson Greene, “‘A Step All-Important and Essential to Victory’: Henry W. Slocum and the Twelfth Corps on July 1–2, 1863,” in Gary W. Gallagher, ed., Three Days at Gettysburg: Essays on Confederate and Union Leadership (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1999), 169–203; Jeffrey D. Wert, Gettysburg: Day Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Bradley M. Gottfried, Brigades of Gettysburg: The Union and Confederate Brigades at the Battle of Gettysburg (Cambridge, Mass.: De Capo, 2002), 383–387; Harry W. Pfanz, Gettysburg: Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 224–228, 304, 319–320, 354. Wert, Gettysburg, 66, 289; TLK to Captain Thomas H. Elliott, 6 July 1863, in War of Rebellion, series 1, 27:846–848; John P. Nicholson to RPK, 24 August 1887, BYU; TLK to Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, 8 August 1863, draft, BYU. TLK to Peter Rothermel, n.d., draft, BYU. TLK to EWK, 5 July 1863, BYU; E. D. Townsend, Special Order no. 296, War Department, 4 July 1863; TLK to Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, 2 August 1863, 4 November 1863, all at BYU. EWK Journal, 30 July 1864, 10 November 1864, BYU. Douglas, I Rode with Stonewall, 80–81; TLK to “My dear Sir” [Rothermel?], n.d., draft, BYU. TLK, interview, n.d., BYU; TLK to Rothermel, 21 March 1874, Rothermel Papers, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, copy at BYU; EWK, “Mother of the Regiment,” BYU. See also Nina Silber, Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Alpheus Williams to TLK, 4 March 1868, 3 November 1871, BYU; TLK to G. K. Warren, 8 September 1876, BYU; TLK to John P. Nicholson, 5 June 1879, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Congressmen from Pennsylvania to Stanton, 28 February 1866, BYU. EWK to TLK, 2 June 1861, BYU.

CHAPTER 12. DEVELOPING KANE 1. EWK, manuscript, 1869, 192–199, BYU. 2. Brigham Young Jr. to Young, 18 December 1869, Young Collection; George Q. Cannon to Young, 22 March 1872, Young Collection; TLK Pension File, 1883, National Archives. 3. TLK Pension File. 4. EWK Journal, 10 August 1858, BYU. On McKean County, see Michael A. Leeson, compiler, History of the Counties of McKean, Elk, Cameron and Potter, Pennsylvania, with Biographical Sketches (Chicago: J. H. Beers, 1890); Rufus Barrett Stone, McKean: The Governor’s County (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1926).

Notes to Pages 238–246

329

5. EWK Journal, 15 May 1859, 13 August 1858, 17 October 1858, 31 December 1858, BYU. 6. EWK Journal, 1 November 1858, 23 December 1859, 1 January 1860, BYU. 7. EWK Journal, 3 April 1859, 7 November 1858, 13 March 1860, BYU. 8. EWK Journal, 6 June 1864, 25 June 1864, BYU. 9. TLK to William Biddle, 22 July 1865, 14 September 1866, BYU. 10. TLK to “My dear Sir,” 20 August 1867, 14 September 1867; TLK to a committee of the company, 19 June 1867; Report of the Committee on the reorganization of the Company, [September 1867], all at BYU. 11. TLK to F. Fraley, 14 September 1867, BYU; “The Pennsylvania Wilderness,” New York Semi-Weekly Tribune, 16 August 1867; EWK Journal, 28 August 1858, BYU; Richard H. Hulan, “Swedes in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, online: http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/ppet/swedes/page1.asp; EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 28, BYU; New York Herald quotation in “President Grant’s Visit to General Kane,” Deseret News, 8 September 1869. 12. For temperance, see Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998); Ian Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn.: 1979); Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984). 13. For Pat’s alcoholism, see EWK Journal, 11 May, 19 July, 1 August 1868, BYU. 14. EWK, manuscript on Kane, 1869, typescript, BYU; Pegram, Demon Rum, 58–59; Ann-Marie E. Szymanski, Pathways to Prohibition: Radicals, Moderates, and Social Movement Outcomes (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 82–84. 15. EWK, manuscript on Kane, 1869, typescript, 128–132, 310–312, BYU; “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909. 16. EWK, manuscript on Kane, 1869, typescript, 132, 311–313, BYU; “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909. 17. TLK, notes for an address at Smethport, [ca. 1868], BYU. 18. EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 123–136, BYU; EWK Journal, 14 February 1868, 18 September 1868, BYU. 19. EWK Journal, 18 September 1868, 18 October 1868, 20 February 1868, BYU. 20. TLK, Alaska and the Polar Regions (New York: Journeymen Printer’s Cooperative Association, 1868); EWK Journal, 11 May 1868, BYU; Greeley to Eli S. Parker, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 16 April 1869, BYU. 21. Carlile Pollock Patterson to TLK, 15 July 1870, BYU; EWK Journal, 17 July 1870, 29 July 1870, BYU; Chauncey C. Loomis, Weird and Tragic Shores: The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer (New York: Knopf, 1971). 22. EWK Journal, 6 April 1869, 21 March 1869, 14 April 1869, 18 April 1869, 11 July 1869, BYU; TLK to Charles Durkee, 20 April 1869, draft, BYU. Durkee, who had generally pursued a harmonious relationship with the Mormons, was replaced by John Wilson Shaffer, who immediately clashed with them. 23. Thomas Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana: Uni-

330

24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

Notes to Pages 247–252 versity of Illinois Press, 1977), 95. See also Gerald N. Grob, Mental Institutions in America: Social Policy to 1875 (New York: Free Press, 1973), 270–292. Haskell, Social Science, 49. TLK to John W. Geary, 26 April 1869, draft, BYU; EWK Journal, 6 April 1869, 11 July 1869, 12 December 1869, 25 January 1870, BYU. Second Annual Report of the Board of Commissioners of Public Charities of the State of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg: B. Singerly, 1872), 105; EWK Journal, 25 January 1870, BYU. EWK Journal, 6 November 1870, BYU; Second Annual Report, 105; TLK to Benjamin H. Brewster, 11 November 1869, draft, BYU; Haskell, Social Science, 95. Simon Cameron to TLK, 16 February 1871, BYU; Rufus Barrett Stone, Arthur George Olmsted (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1919), 148; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. For the response of the other members, see “The Board of Charities, a Reply to the Strictures of the President,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 January 1871. EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. In the 1840s, Cameron had been a rival of John Kane in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. Erin Stanley Bradley, Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s Secretary of War: A Political Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 42–45. EWK, account of Grant’s visit, 1869, BYU; Forney to TLK, 17 December 1853, JKK Papers, APS; TLK to Cameron, 15 June, 23 June, 6 July 1869, Cameron Papers, LOC; Bradley, Simon Cameron, 309–310; Daniel W. Pfaff, “John Wein Forney,” in Garraty and Carnes, American National Biography, 8:258–259. TLK also invited Horace Greeley; see TLK to Greeley, 4 August 1869, Margaret Dow Collection, Rauner Special Collections, Dartmouth College. EWK, account of Grant’s visit, 1869, BYU. TLK to Captain L. Rogers, 28 August 1869, clipping in EWK Journal, 1903, BYU; EWK, account of Grant’s visit, 1869, BYU; Jean Baker, “Simon Cameron,” in Garraty and Carnes, American National Biography, 4:259–260. TLK to Cameron, 28 April 1872, Cameron Papers, LOC; TLK to Ulysses S. Grant, draft, 28 April 1872, JKK Collection, HSP. On the Liberal Republicans, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 488–511; Richard Allen Gerber, “The Liberal Republicans of 1872 in Historiographical Perspective,” Journal of American History 62.1 (1975): 40–73. Foner, Reconstruction, 489; EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 64–65, BYU. George W. Julian, Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1884), 337, in Andrew L. Slap, “Transforming Politics: The Liberal Republican Movement and the End of Civil War Era Political Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2002), 73; Michael E. McGerr, “The Meaning of Liberal Republicanism: The Case of Ohio,” Civil War History 28 (December 1982): 312–313. Robert W. Burg, “Amnesty, Civil Rights, and the Meaning of Liberal Republicanism, 1862–1872,” American Nineteenth-Century History 4.3 (Fall 2003): 29–60.

Notes to Pages 252–260

331

37. James M. McPherson, “Grant or Greeley? The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872,” American Historical Review 71.1 (1965): 43–61. 38. Cannon to Young, 8 May 1872, 22 March 1872, Young Collection. 39. Cannon to Young, 8 May 1872, Young Collection; “Death of General Kane: A Brave Soldier and Public Man Passes Away,” Philadelphia Press, 27 December 1883; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. On Grant’s nomination, see Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” Journal of American History 53.4 (1967): 727–750. 40. TLK to Orville E. Babcock, 22 October 1874, BYU. 41. Warren Ledger, 2 January 1880, RPK Papers, APS. 42. Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 613–617; “Death of General Kane: A Brave Soldier and Public Man Passes Away,” Philadelphia Press, 27 December 1883; scrap in writing of Elisha K. Kane, BYU. 43. EWK, manuscript dated 26 March 1869–11 April 1869, 165, BYU; Leeson, Counties, 560; “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909. 44. EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. Because of the increasing weight of trains, the original bridge was replaced in 1900 by a sturdier structure. In 1970, the bridge became the center of a state park; in 2003, a tornado destroyed the viaduct. Its future remains uncertain at present. W. George Thornton, “Tracks Across the Sky,” Erie Railroad 45.6 (August 1949), in Zobell, Sentinel, 247–254; Dan Cupper, “Loss at Kinzua,” Railroad History (Fall/Winter 2003): 105–111.

CHAPTER 13. ANTI-ANTI-POLYGAMY 1. Bernhisel to Young, 27 December 1861, Young Collection; Brigham Young Jr. to Young, 11 July 1862, 7 August 1862, Young Collection; Cannon Journal, 14 July 1862, transcript, private possession; Thomas B. H. Stenhouse to Young, 7 June 1863, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 29 April 1864, Young Collection; Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 12. In his remarks to Stenhouse regarding “enemies,” Kane likely referred to Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, killed at Shiloh in April 1862, and Union major general Fitz-John Porter, court-martialed for alleged insubordination at the Second Battle of Bull Run. 2. Brigham Young Jr. to Young, 18 December 1869, Young Collection. 3. Young Jr. to Young, 18 December 1869, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 26 October 1869, Young Collection. 4. Snow quoted in Arrington, Brigham Young, 364–365; TLK to Young, 20 March 1870, 18 June 1870, Young Collection. 5. Young to TLK, 14 February 1870, BYU; EWK Journal, 20 March 1870, BYU; TLK to Young, 20 March 1870, BYU. 6. EWK Journal, 4 October 1870, BYU. The idea that Young would consider Kane a successor to his ecclesiastical position seems doubtful since Kane had never shown interest in conversion to Mormonism. Although the Saints revered Kane for his services, it seems unlikely they would have acquiesced to him replacing Young. In the

332

7.

8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to Pages 260–265 turmoil following Joseph Smith’s death, Young had established a pattern for succession that promoted the senior apostle to the presidency, though he had also tinkered with succession at times. The lack of additional documentation makes any clear understanding of Young’s proposal impossible, but the episode raises intriguing questions. Had John W., known as a maverick, overstated his father’s thinking (probably the most likely scenario)? Alternatively, did Young, viewing the rules of succession as unsettled, secretly send John W. to seek out Kane’s response? A final possibility is that Young referred to succession in the long-dormant Council of Fifty. Joseph Smith founded the council in the early 1840s, envisioning the group as the political arm of the church that would rule during the millennium. Except for a few brief flurries of activity, the council was primarily symbolic. In Smith’s vision, the council included non-Mormons, prompting some historians to theorize that Kane belonged to it. However, no documents suggest Kane was a member. D. Michael Quinn, “The Council of Fifty and Its Members, 1844 to 1945,” BYU Studies 20.2 (1980): 163–197; Klaus Hansen, Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God and the Council of Fifty in Mormon History (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967), 62. Thomas G. Alexander, “Federal Authority Versus Polygamic Theocracy: James B. McKean and the Mormons, 1870–1875,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1.3 (1966): 85–100. Young to TLK, 16 April 1871, 27 September 1871, Young Collection. TLK to Young, 12 October 1871, 30 November 1871, BYU; TLK to Young, 18 June 1870, Young Collection; TLK, “Notes of Communication to Prest. Young,” n.d., BYU; Arrington, Brigham Young, 371–373. TLK to Cameron, 13 October 1871, Cameron Papers, LOC; TLK to Cameron, n.d., draft, BYU; TLK to Young, 9 November 1871, draft, BYU. Cameron to TLK, 3 November 1871, BYU; TLK to Fish, 31 October 1871, BYU; TLK to Grant, 29 November 1871, BYU; Young to TLK, 5 March 1872, Young Collection. Cannon to Young, 22 March 1872, Young Collection. Young to TLK, 16 April 1871, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 12 October 1871, BYU; TLK to Young, 16 October 1872, Young Collection; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. EWK to Harriet Kane, 29 November 1872, BYU; EWK to Elisha Kane, 4 December 1872, BYU. EWK to Elisha Kane, 7 December 1872, BYU. EWK, Gentile Account, 50, 170; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, 20 December 1873, BYU. EWK, Gentile Account, 162–172. Bitton, Cannon, 178–180; Lyman, Political Deliverance, 16; EWK, Gentile Account, 107. EWK to Cameron, draft; three drafts exist at BYU. I quote from the undated draft; the others are dated 29 December 1872 and 1 January 1873. The “Methodist orator” referred to is the Reverend John Philip Newman, a leading Methodist minister and

Notes to Pages 266–272

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

333

chaplain of the U.S. Senate, who had famously debated Apostle Orson Pratt in 1870 in Salt Lake City on whether the Bible sanctioned polygamy. EWK, Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey from Utah to Arizona (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1874). I use the modern edition by the same title, ed. Everett L. Cooley (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Press, 1974). Her St. George journal was published more than a century later as A Gentile Account of Life in Utah’s Dixie. For analyses, see Bushman, “Mormon Domestic Life,” and Barnes, “Elizabeth D. Kane,” 104–175. For anti-polygamy fiction, see Gordon, Mormon Question, 19–54. Eliason, “Curious Gentiles,” 156–157. See also Edwina Jo Snow, “British Travelers View the Saints, 1847–1877,” BYU Studies 31 (Spring 1991): 63–81; Craig S. Smith, “The Curious Meet the Mormons: Images from Travel Narratives, 1850s and 1860s,” Journal of Mormon History 24.2 (1998): 155–181; Homer, On the Way to Somewhere Else. EWK, Twelve Mormon Homes, 41–42, 5, 21. EWK, Gentile Account, 39, 57–58, 117. EWK, Twelve Mormon Homes, 5, 101, 106; EWK, Gentile Account, 118; EWK to Francis Fisher Kane, 15 February 1904, Francis Fisher Kane Papers, APS. EWK, Gentile Account, 170–179. Bitton, Cannon, 188–190; Wood to Henry Ferguson, 6 August 1874, BYU. Gordon, Mormon Question, 112; Walter Lippincott to TLK, 9 March 1874, BYU. Cannon to TLK, 9 March 1874, BYU; Charles W. Shields to TLK, 27 March 1874, BYU; Wood to TLK, 15 April 1874, BYU. On Shields, see “Charles Woodruff Shields,” National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1898–1984), 13:174. TLK to [Wood], 19 April 1874, BYU; Wood to EWK, 28 May 1874, BYU. TLK to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 June 1874, Emerson Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University; TLK to [Wood], 6 June 1874, BYU; Cannon to TLK, 1 June 1874, 4 June 1874, BYU; Wood to EWK, 4 June 1874, BYU; EWK, Twelve Mormon Homes, xxi. “A Pleasant Book on the Mormons,” Courier Journal, 5 June 1874, BYU; Charles A. Dana to TLK, 8 June 1874, BYU; Eli K. Price to EWK, 8 June 1874, BYU. Cannon to TLK, 24 June 1874, BYU; Bitton, Cannon, 190–191; Gordon, Mormon Question, 113; Wood to EWK, 2 July 1874, BYU; Wood to Henry Ferguson, 6 August 1874, BYU. [George Q. Cannon], “Memorandum of Interview with Hon. Eli K. Price, Philadelphia, Pa.,” 27 May 1873, BYU; Arrington, Brigham Young, 422; “Eli Kirk Price,” National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, 10:412–413. TLK to Young, 2 April 1873, 4 April 1873, Young Collection; Brigham Young Jr. to Young, 6 June 1873, Young Collection; Young to TLK, 16 November 1873, BYU; Arrington, Brigham Young, 423. Cannon to TLK, 6 September 1878, BYU. The executors faced three specific difficulties: ensuring the church received its property that Young held as trustee-in-trust,

334

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

Notes to Pages 272–277 satisfying the heirs, and protecting John W. Young—deeply in debt from speculative schemes—from insolvency. At one point, Young’s executors were declared in contempt of court for “refusing to give additional bonds of $150,000,” which they considered “blackmail.” Kane telegraphed: “I will be your bail for $150,000, if your court will accept of me.” Cannon, “General Thomas L. Kane,” Contributor (March 1884): 238. See also Arrington, Brigham Young, 422–430. See F. Lamond Tullis, Mormons in Mexico: The Dynamics of Faith and Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 1–50, though Tullis underestimates Kane’s role in the plans for Mexican colonies. TLK, notebook in Mexico, 1876, BYU; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU. Brigham Young Jr. to TLK, 27 March 1873, BYU; Young to TLK, 31 July 1873, 16 November 1873, BYU; TLK to Young, 4 December 1873, BYU; Charles S. Peterson, Take Up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870–1900 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973). Cannon Journal, 4–20 April 1876, transcript, private possession; TLK to Young, 28 May 1876, Young Collection. Cannon Journal, 23 July 1876, 29 July 1876, transcript, private possession; Cannon to Young, 15 January 1877, Young Collection. Nineteenth-century Mormons often referred to indigenous peoples of North and South America as “Lamanites” after the Book of Mormon people believed to be their ancestors. EKK, essay on a trip to northern Mexico, written for a class at Princeton University, n.d., BYU. TLK to Young, 2 March 1877, Young Collection; Cannon Journal, 11 January 1877, transcript, private possession. TLK, Coahuila. Cannon to Young, 15 January 1877, Young Collection; TLK to Young, 2 March 1877, Young Collection. Cannon Journal, 16 March 1878, 1 February 1882, transcript, private possession; Taylor to TLK, 14 May 1878, BYU; Cannon to TLK, 6 September 1878, BYU; Tullis, Mormons in Mexico. Robert T. Divett, Medicine and the Mormons: An Introduction to the History of Latterday Saint Health Care (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1981), 161–163. See also Thomas W. Simpson, “Mormons Study ‘Abroad’: Brigham Young’s Romance with American Higher Education, 1867–1877,” Church History 76.4 (December 2007): 778–798. Two of the Mormon women, Margaret C. Shipp and Emma Atkin, became classmates of Harriet (and probably Elizabeth) Kane. Harriet Kane Journal, 10 June 1882, BYU. TLK to Young, 4 December 1873, BYU; Cannon Journal, 19 May 1874, transcript, private possession; Arrington, “‘In Honorable Remembrance,’” 440; Ernest L. Wilkinson, ed., Brigham Young University: The First One Hundred Years (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 1:63–64. L. Dwight Israelsen, “United Orders,” in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 4:1493–1495; Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y.

Notes to Pages 278–285

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

335

Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976). Arrington, Brigham Young, 377–381; EWK, biographical sketch of TLK, n.d. [post 1883], BYU; Cannon Journal, 19 May 1874, 24 February 1882, transcript, private possession. Cannon, Daniel H. Wells, and Brigham Young Jr. to TLK, 29 August 1877, telegram, BYU. Kane also may have seen Young through the figure of the romantic hero. Above all, Young was a man of action who trusted (like Kane) his own decisions above the cultural currents of the age. Indeed, Thomas Carlyle’s seminal lectures On Heroes, HeroWorship, & the Heroic in History (1841) had taken Mohammed as one of its representative heroes. Nineteenth-century Americans often tied the Muslim and Mormon prophets together as examples of false revelation, deliberate deception, and unbridled sensuality. Rejecting centuries of received wisdom, Carlyle presented Mohammed as the “Hero as Prophet.” For Carlyle, sincere belief in themselves and their missions characterized heroic prophets. In Young, Kane found sincerity, leadership abilities, and a willingness to suffer societal censure for his belief in his own mission. Carlyle, On Heroes, 37–66. EWK to Francis Fisher Kane, 15 February 1904, Francis Fisher Kane Papers, APS. “T.L.K.’s account of his journey to Salt Lake City 1877,” BYU; Zobell, Sentinel, 219. Cannon Journal, 26 June 1879, 10 May 1882, transcript, private possession. TLK to Young, 30 November 1871, 4 December 1873, BYU. Gordon, Mormon Question, 119–145, 268; Cannon Journal, 16 March 1878, transcript, private possession; Cannon to TLK, 16 March 1878, 20 March 1878, BYU. Biddle was a distant relative of Kane’s Civil War antagonist Charles Biddle. Cannon Journal, 24 April 1882, 10 May 1882, 6 June 1882, 16 June 1882, transcript, private possession.

EPILOGUE 1. Harriet A. Kane Diary, 13–25 December 1883, BYU; EWK to George Q. Cannon, 30 December 1883, LDSCA, in Arrington, “Kane,” 400–401; Times (Philadelphia), 28 December 1883, in Campbell, History of the Friendly Sons, 440–441. 2. “The Late Colonel Kane,” Harper’s Weekly, 12 January 1884, 19; Times (Philadelphia), 28 December 1883, in Campbell, History of the Friendly Sons, 440–441. 3. “Death of General Thos. L. Kane,” Deseret News, 2 January 1884; “Death of General Thomas L. Kane,” Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star 46 (21 January 1884): 42–44. 4. EWK Journal, 21 April 1903, 24 June 1903, BYU. See also Barnes, “Elizabeth D. Kane,” 186–199. 5. “Elizabeth Dennistoun Kane,” Kane Leader, 28 May 1909; “Dr. Evan Kane Dies of Pneumonia at 71: Surgeon Who Operated Twice on Himself Fails to Rally Under Oxygen Tent,” New York Times, 2 April 1932, 23. 6. Kenney, Woodruff ’s Journal, 5:168–170, entry for 25 February 1858; George Albert

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Note to Page 286

Smith to Israel Frank Evans, 1 October 1947, Israel Frank Evans Collection, LDSCA. On the statue at the Utah State Capitol, see the Nicholas G. Morgan Papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, Special Collections, University of Utah. Morgan was a philanthropist who funded the statue as well as Zobell’s biography. On the Kane Memorial Chapel, see Kane Chapel File, LDSCA; Church Information Service, Kane Memorial Chapel Files, 1970–71; Kane Chapel Rededication Papers, LDSCA. On Shipps, see Philip Barlow, “Jan Shipps and the Mainstreaming of Mormon Studies,” Church History 73.2 (2004): 412–426. 7. Emerson, “Heroism,” in Emerson, Collected Works, 143–156.

Index

Adams, Charles Francis, 78, 97 Adams, John Quincy, 4–5, 78 Agassiz, Louis, 108 Alaska, 180, 244–245 Allegheny Mountains. See McKean County, Pennsylvania Allen, James, 57–58, 62, 65, 67 American Anti-Slavery Society, 126 American Courier (Philadelphia), 79–80 American Geographical Society, 244 American Peace Society, 40 American Philosophical Society, 6, 19, 21, 309 American Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, 38–39 American Temperance Society, 241 Anderson, Kirk, 197 Anglicanism, 1, 6, 17 Anthony, Susan B., 69 anti-evangelical, Democratic reform, xvi–xvii, 30–31, 69–70, 93–96, 207–209, 233; and Mormons, 48, 73, 78, 257, 278; and religious unorthodoxy, xviii–xix, 69. See also individual reforms anti-polygamy legislation, 182, 204, 257, 259, 264–265, 267–270, 272, 276, 279– 281 antislavery, 34–35, 81, 143, 201, 226, 227;

and Democratic Party, xvi, 29–30, 93– 101, 105–107, 110–113, 252, 306n5; and fugitive slaves, 113–127. See also slavery Appleby, William, 78, 157 Arctic exploration, 42, 74, 122, 137, 155, 164, 244 Arizona, 273 Ashby, Turner, 222–223, 233 Atkin, Emma, 334n46 Babbit, Almon W., 86 Bache, Alexander D., 298n37 Bancroft, George, 54–55, 57, 63, 102–103 Bayard, George D., 217–218, 222 Bellamy, Edward, 277 Bennett, James Gordon, 90, 102–103 Benson, Ezra Taft, 78 Benton, Thomas H., 53–54 Bernhisel, John M., 82, 86, 88, 91, 151–153, 257; and the Utah War, 162, 170, 173, 195–196, 198, 201 Biddle, Charles J., 214–222, 224, 325n15, 325n19 Biddle, George W., 279–280, 335n56 Black, Jeremiah, 111, 157, 176, 185, 195–196, 202–203, 280 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 143 Blair, Francis P., 248–249

337

338

Index

Blake, James, 85 Book of Mormon, 68 Boston, 77–78, 114, 117, 139 Boyle, Henry G., 61 Brandebury, Lemuel G., 86, 90–91 Breckenridge, John C., 211 Breckenridge, Robert J., 75 Brent, Robert J., 119 Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company, 158 Brigham Young University, 277 British Columbia, 239, 261 Brocchus, Perry E., 86, 88, 90 Brown, Antoinette, 143 Browne, Albert G., Jr., 177, 319n9 Bryant, William Cullen, 96, 269 Buchanan, James, 54, 77, 94, 111, 156; correspondence with Kane during Utah War, 156–157, 170–171, 175, 181–182, 184–185, 188–189; and Utah War, xiii, 149, 158–163, 167–168, 173, 190–205 Bucktails, xiv, 207, 212–228, 241–242, 284 Buffalo Courier, 86–87 Bull Run, Battle of, 214, 224 Bull Run, Second Battle of, 225 Burns, Anthony, 115 Butler, Benjamin F., 78 Cadwalader, John, 172, 196 Caldwell, Merritt C., 11 Calhoun, John C., 4 California, 48, 50, 53–54, 56, 60, 64, 80, 83, 239 Cameron, Simon, 218–219, 248–250, 261, 265, 267, 330n29 Camp Floyd, 191 Camp Scott, xiii, 159, 168, 173–187, 189 Cannon, George Q., 110–111, 204, 252, 260, 268–269, 272, 279–280; comments on Kane, 212, 262, 279; and Mormon colonization of Mexico, 273–276; and Mormon image, 197–199; visits Kane, 136, 257–258, 278–279

Cape May, New Jersey, 19 Carlyle, Thomas, 125, 335n51 Cass, Lewis, 16, 20, 41, 52, 94, 97, 99, 183, 189 Catholicism, 1, 9, 13, 72, 141, 250; antiCatholic riots, 31–33; immigrants, 107, 241–242; Kane comments about, 17, 24–25, 33 Catlett’s Station, Virginia, 225 Central America, 180, 239 Chancellorsville, Battle of, 229–230 Channing, Walter H., 84 Chase, Salmon P., 98–99, 105–106, 252, 258 chivalry, xix, 42, 208–211, 215, 221–224, 232, 235 Christiana, Pennsylvania, fugitive slave case, 117–120, 123 Chrysostom, John, 34 civil disobedience, 118, 126–127, 250 Civil War, xiv, 147–148, 203–235, 238, 252, 257. See also Bucktails; individual battles Clark, Francis Jessie, 166–167 Clay, Henry, 4, 35, 85 Clinton, Jeter, 160 Cobb, Augusta Adams, 77 Cobham, George A., 230 Compromise of 1850, 73, 101, 113, 118 Comte, Auguste, xv, xix, 13, 22–24, 34, 134, 293n25 Conkling, Roscoe, 253 Corwin, Thomas, 90 Council Bluffs, Iowa, 48, 58, 71 Cradlebaugh, John, 202–203 Cuba, 14, 105, 155 Cullom, Shelby M., 259 Cumming, Alfred, xiv, 151, 158, 161, 174, 176–190, 192–193, 195–203, 205, 316n19 Cumming, Elizabeth, 186 Curtin, Andrew, 207 Curtis, George William, 126 Cuyler, Cornelius C., 33

Index Dallas, George, 35–36, 39, 49, 52, 54, 93–94, 104 Dana, Charles A., 269 Davis, Jefferson, 216 death penalty, abolition of, 37–40, 80, 102, 227 Dellam, Hannah, 117 Democratic Party: and antislavery, xvii, 93–113; and Civil War, 214–215, 227– 228; conception of liberty, 212, 237, 241, 273; and death penalty, 38; election of 1844, 34–36; election of 1848, 93–99; election of 1860, 211; influence on Republican Party, xvii, 251–253; newspapers, 86–87; and reform, xvi–xvii, 30–31, 95–96, 139, 143, 205, 207, 285; and religious liberty, xviii, 7, 48, 87, 153; sectionalism within, 105–106, 110–111, 211; and Utah War, 151, 156, 182, 203; and Young America, 101–103 Democratic Review, 103 Deseret News, 283 Dickens, Charles, 85 Dickinson College, 9–12 Douglas, Henry Kyd, 232 Douglas, Stephen A., 102, 105–106, 111, 156 Douglass, Frederick, 84, 98, 119 Dranesville, Battle of, 217, 219–221, 224, 230, 237 Drummond, William W., 154, 157–158 dueling, xix, 14, 40, 71, 102, 142, 207–209, 211–212, 229; Kane’s challenge to Albert Johnston, 177–179; Kane’s challenge to Charles Biddle, 216–222 Durbin, John Price, 9, 11 Durkee, Charles, 245, 329n22 Eckels, Delana R., 177, 181, 186, 189, 195, 197, 202–203, 319n8, 322n53 Edes, H. I. W., 65 Edinburgh Review, 85 Edmunds Act, 280–281

339

Egan, Howard, 187 Elder, William, 8–9, 143 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 143 Emancipation Proclamation, 226 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29–30, 84, 106, 125, 138, 269 ethnology, 93, 107–110, 274–275 evangelical reform, xv–xvi, 6–7, 25, 29–33, 39–40, 93–96, 285–286; and honor, 207–209, 233; and Mormons, 69–70, 73, 78, 205, 257, 264, 267, 278 Evans, George Henry, 102 Ewell, Richard S., 223, 231, 233 fashion, 146–148 Federalist Party, 4 Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, 128, 143–145, 276, 334n46 Ferguson, James, 136 Fillmore, Millard, 73, 86–89, 114, 116, 119 Fish, Hamilton, 261 Fisher, Sidney George, 6, 122, 125 Floyd, John B., 157, 190, 195, 315n2 Forney, Jacob, 176–177, 182, 185, 202 Forney, John W., 106, 249 Fort Laramie, 57, 193 Fort Leavenworth, 55–57, 64, 159, 182 Fort Limhi, 174–175 Fox, Margaret, 44, 209, 244 France, 5, 15–28, 103, 140, 229 Franklin, John, 42, 137 Free Soil, 31, 94–101, 106–107, 251 free trade, 35, 250–251, 258 Freemasonry, 7, 135 Frelinghuysen, Frederick Theodore, 264 Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 78 Fugitive Slave Law, xvii, 113–127, 164, 204, 226, 250 Furness, William H., 126 Garfield, James, 253–254 Garnet, Henry, 116

340

Index

Garrison, William Lloyd, xvi, 30, 38, 40, 93, 120, 124, 126 Geary, John W., 230–231, 233, 235, 247, 261 gentility, 29, 37, 135, 143, 208–209, 229 Gettysburg, Battle of, xiv, 227, 230–235 Gilpin, Charles, 105 Gliddon, George R., 108 Godkin, E. L., 250 Gorsuch, Edward, 117 Gove, Jesse A., 176–177, 181, 185 Grand Army of the Republic, 282 Grant, Jedediah M., 53–54, 88–91, 154 Grant, Ulysses S., 248–254, 259–262, 264–265, 274 Gray, Elizabeth, 3 Greeley, Horace, 38–40, 225, 244–245, 264, 273; and antislavery, 101, 117, 119, 121–122; and Mormons, 69, 74–75, 80– 81, 153, 192; as presidential candidate, 251–253, 262; relationship with Kane, 80–81, 136 Grier, Robert C., 115–116, 118–119 Grover, Cuvier, 177 Hall, Charles Francis, 245 Hanks, Ebenezer, 166 Hanway, Castner, 118–119 Harper’s Weekly, xx, 282–283 Harris, Broughton D., 86, 90 Harrison, William Henry, 34 Harrisonburg, Battle of, 222–224, 230–231, 233, 237 Hayes, Rutherford B., 253 Henry, William “Jerry,” 114 Holmes, George Frederick, 24 honor, xix, 19, 37, 52, 71, 157, 168, 170, 177– 79, 196, 240, 285; and Fugitive Slave Law, 115, 118; language of, 79, 186; and masculinity, 125–126; during wartime, 209–235. See also dueling Hooker, Joseph, 226 Hooper, William, 204, 258–259, 279 House of Refuge, 128, 141

Household Words, 85 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 246 Hudson’s Bay Company, 49–50 Hyde, Orson, 48, 63, 84 Imitation of Christ (Kempis), 34, 134 Independence Hall, 104, 116, 155 infant schools (salles d’asiles), 16, 138–141 Ingraham, Edward D., 116 Irish famine, 76, 78 Jackson, Andrew, 4–5, 34–36, 52 Jackson, Stonewall, 222, 232–233 Johnson, Edward, 233 Johnson, Jane, 120, 310–311n21 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 149, 159, 174–182, 187–188, 197, 208, 331n1 Kane, Elias (cousin of John K. Kane), 5 Kane, Elias (uncle of John K. Kane), 4 Kane, Elisha (grandfather of Thomas L. Kane), 1–2 Kane, Elisha Kent (brother of Thomas L. Kane): Arctic expeditions, 42, 74, 122, 137, 169; birth of, 4, 287; correspondence with John Kane, 25–26, 33, 36, 41, 55, 66, 117; correspondence with Pat Kane, 67; correspondence with Thomas Kane, 15, 20, 33, 35, 41, 42, 49–52, 55, 62, 78, 93–94; death of, 108, 155–156, 164, 196, 244; fame of, 176, 192; health of, 8–9; medals, 212; and MexicanAmerican War, 42, 44, 74, 156; photo of, 10, 43; promotion by Thomas, 74, 137; relationship with Thomas, 19, 41–46; relationships with women, 44, 209, 244; travels of, 41–42; youth, 7–10, 13 Kane, Elisha Kent (son of Thomas L. Kane), 133, 171, 216, 229, 254, 274, 284, 287 Kane, Elizabeth (Bessie), 4, 45, 57, 60, 140 Kane, Elizabeth Dennistoun Wood: attends medical school, 131, 143–145,

Index 334n46; childhood of, 128–129; children, 133, 145–148, 213–214; comments on Mormons, 65–66, 68–70, 259–260, 268–269, 273, 277–278; comments on Thomas Kane’s early life, 16, 18, 21–22, 28, 34, 36–37, 40, 94; comments on Thomas’s life after their marriage, 105, 110, 122–123, 126–127, 155–156, 161, 163, 165, 193–194, 196, 200–201, 244–248; correspondence with Thomas, 24, 67, 116, 179, 184, 187, 211–212, 214–215, 225– 230; criticizes James Buchanan, 162; criticizes Brigham Young, 267; described by Thomas, 131–132; describes Thomas, 245; early married life, 131–138; engaged to Thomas, 91, 129–131, 141–142; hosts President Grant, 249–250; images of, 132, 263; intervenes to stop duel, 219– 220; life during Utah War, 164–165, 171–173, 192; life in McKean County, 238–248, 254; marriage to Thomas, xvii, 128; meets Thomas, 15; opposes leaving Pennsylvania, 238–239, 245; partner in reform, 131, 138–145, 236; pawns silver, 273; relationship with Kane family, 133; and religion, 24, 134–135, 156, 172–173; and sexuality, 145–148; and temperance, 241–243; uncomfortable in high society, 135–136; views on women’s rights, 142– 148; visits Utah, 262–265; writes Twelve Mormon Homes, 148, 257, 265–270 Kane, Evan O’Neill, 133, 147, 213–214, 284 Kane, Harriet Amelia, 66, 133, 135, 145– 147, 212, 229, 263, 282, 284, 334n46 Kane, Jane Duval Leiper, 3–8, 27, 45, 133, 136, 144, 172, 287; correspondence with Thomas Kane, 12, 17, 28; reaction to Thomas’s visit to Mormons, 51; sells family home, 238; travels to Cuba, 155 Kane, John (great-grandfather of Thomas L. Kane), 1 Kane, John Kent (brother of Thomas L. Kane), 4, 287

341

Kane, John Kintzing, xvii, 97, 102, 192, 209, 330n29; advice to Elizabeth Kane, 171; advice to Jane Kane, 7–8; advice to Thomas Kane, 10–14, 18, 20; ambitions for children, 13; correspondence with Elisha, 25–26, 33, 36, 41, 55, 66, 117; correspondence with Thomas, 19–21, 25–26, 62, 179; death of, 172, 190, 196; describes Thomas, 42; and Fugitive Slave Law, 113–127; images of, 2, 10; as judge, 41, 54–55, 113–127, 138; and Louis Kossuth, 104; marriage, 3–4; political career, 4–5, 34–36, 111; relationship with James Buchanan, 156; relationship with Elizabeth Kane, 133; relationship with James Polk, 52, 98–99; and religion, 6– 7; rules Thomas in contempt of court, 115; views on Thomas’s relationship with Mormons, 50–51, 55, 63, 84, 164; writes pamphlet with Thomas, 94; writing, 5–6; youth of, 1–2 Kane, John Kintzing, Jr., 4, 137, 155, 164, 173, 209, 226 Kane, Pennsylvania, xvii, 240–256 Kane, Robert Patterson (Pat), 4, 22–23, 44, 63, 67, 172, 173, 192, 194, 216; alcoholism of, 241; and antislavery, 94, 113, 116, 124, 127, 310n17; as Copperhead, 226; correspondence with Thomas Kane, 16, 179, 187; describes Thomas Kane, 66–67; and Female Medical College, 143; marriage of, 209; relationship with Thomas, 45, 171; youth, 7, 13 Kane, Thomas L., Jr. (William Kane), 133, 284, 287 Kane, Thomas L.: and 1844 riots, 32–33; and abolition of the death penalty, 36–40, 227; advises Mormons on legal issues, 260–262, 279–280; ambivalence about politics, 100, 104, 252–253; antievangelicalism of, 33, 39, 48, 68, 96; and antislavery, 34–36, 93–127, 201, 207, 211, 226–227; and Arctic exploration, 137,

342

Index

Kane, Thomas L. (continued) 155–156, 160, 164, 244–245; attraction of the West to, 238–39, 245; birth of, 4; and Board of Charities, 246–248; and Brigham Young’s will, 262, 270–272; builds Kinzua Viaduct, 254–255; and Civil War, xiv, 203–235; Civil War wounds of, 217–219, 222, 228, 231; death of, 282– 283; and depression, 9, 14–15, 37, 49, 57, 103, 155–156, 195–196; descriptions of, 26–27, 253; and duel challenges, 177– 179, 216–222; and educational reform, 98, 138–140; European voyages of, 13–27; education of, 9–12; finances of, 26, 123, 137–138, 194, 209, 229, 253; and gentility, 208–209, 229; health of, 8–9, 14–15, 18–21, 45, 56, 59, 108, 136; health after the Civil War, 237–238, 262, 264, 275; health during Utah War, 160, 165, 167, 195–196, 198–199; and honor, xix, 19, 125–126, 209–235; images of, 10, 152, 213, 235, 271; interest in history, 290n2; joins militia, 40; judicial clerkship of, 41, 55, 57, 61, 113–127, 138, 165; as land agent for McKean Company, 138, 172, 196, 228–230, 238–240, 243–244; legal study of, 19, 42; and masculinity, 19, 117, 124–127; memory of, xx, 284–285; and Mexican-American War, 40–41; and Mormon camps, 39, 42, 47–70, 164; and Mormon colonization of Mexico, 272–276; and Mormon communitarianism, 277–278; and Mormon education, 276–277; and Mormon image, 49, 55, 61–62, 71–92, 180, 184, 186–187, 189, 261, 267; motivations to defend Mormons, 48–50, 67–70; patriarchal blessing of, 66; and peace reform, 36, 40–41, 211–212; physical description of, xv, 125, 237–238; plans to leave Pennsylvania, 238–40, 244–246; politics as Democrat and Free Soiler, 34–36, 94–112; politics as Republican, 207, 226, 241, 248–254;

as prisoner of war, 222–224; promotes Elisha Kane, 44, 51, 74, 137; racial views of, 106–110, 226, 251, 275, 308n39; as reformer, xv–xvi, 29–31; relationship with Brigham Young, xviii, 259–260, 278, 331n6; relationship with Elisha, 8, 19, 41–46, 137; relationship with Elizabeth Kane, 15, 66, 129–138, 141–148, 194; relationship with Horace Greeley, 80–81; relationship with John Kane, 122–123; religious conversion to Christianity, 151, 161, 165, 172–173, 193–194, 207, 212, 241; religious views before conversion, xviii–xix, 7, 13–14, 17–20, 24–25, 33–34, 68–69, 76, 140; resigns as U. S. Commissioner, 115; as romantic hero, xix–xx, 17, 125, 151, 212, 274–275, 283; rumors of conversion to Mormonism, 59–60, 67–68, 190, 302n55; runs for Congress, 252–253; seeks territorial governorships, 244–246; self-description, 1, 28, 42, 65, 100, 104, 229; and sexuality, 26, 145–148; sickness at Mormon Camps, 64–66; and Utah political positions, 86, 153, 245–246, 280; and Utah War, xiii–xiv; views on law, 126–127; views of Native Americans, 244–245, 273–274; views of polygamy, 88–89, 104, 268–269; visits from Mormons, 135; visits Utah, 254, 262–265, 279; and women’s rights, 36, 141–142; writes pamphlets, 66, 81–85, 89–91, 94, 140–141, 275; writing, 19, 22, 35–37, 41, 49; youth, 7–8 Kane, William Leiper, 4, 108, 287 Kane and Brothers, 1–2 Kane County, Utah, 191 Kane Rifle Regiment. See Bucktails Kanesville, Iowa, 84 Kanosh, 202–203, 323n68 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 105–107, 111 Kearny, Stephen W., 53–54, 56–57, 67 Kelley, William D., 39, 139, 143 Kempis, Thomas à, 34, 134

Index Kendall, Amos, 52–54 Kenrick, Francis Patrick, 32, 55 Kent, Sybil, 1 Kimball, Heber C., 58, 68, 158–159, 166, 170, 192 Kimball, William, 136, 180, 184–185, 187 King, Preston, 96, 99 Kinney, John F., 258 Kintzing, Elizabeth, 2 Kinzua Viaduct, 254–255, 284, 331n44 Kossuth, Louis, 103–105, 325n15 Lafayette, Marquis de, 4, 250 Latter-day Saints, Church of Jesus Christ of. See Mormonism Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, 283 Lawrence, Margaret, 129 Le National, 22, 36 Lee, John D., 204 Lee, Robert E., xiv, 229 Leiper, John, 11 Leiper, Thomas, 3–4 Liberal Republican movement, xvii, 250– 253 Liberty Party, 31, 97 Lincoln, Abraham, 211, 224, 226–228, 232 Little, Jesse C., 47–56, 58, 63, 78 Liverpool, England, 14, 128 London, 14–15 Loring, Edward Greely, 115 Louis-Philippe, King, 15–16, 103 Lovejoy, Elijah P., 125 Lyman, Amasa, 78, 167 manliness, 44, 124–127, 143–144, 217 Marcy, William, 54 Mariscal, Ignacio, 274 Marrast, Armand, 22 Martineau, Harriet, 23 Mason, James M., 122, 204 Mayhew, Henry, 85 McClellan, George, 221–222

343

McCulloch, Ben, 190 McKean, James B., 260–262, 264 McKean and Elk Land Improvement Company, 138, 172, 196, 228–230, 238– 240, 243–244 McKean County, Pennsylvania, 138, 144, 164, 194, 212, 226, 230, 232, 238–256, 279, 282–283 McKean Miner, 226 McNeil, Hugh W., 219–221, 225 Meade, George G., 222 Mercantile Library Company (Philadelphia), 7 Methodism, xv, 9, 33, 250 Mexican-American War, 40–41, 47, 50–52, 102–103; debate over new territories, 73, 81, 93–100 Mexico, 165, 180, 239, 272–276 Minkins, Shadrach, 114 Monk, Maria, 24 Morgan, Nicholas G., 335n6 Mormon Battalion, 52–60, 65, 83 Mormon History Association, 285 Mormon image, 49, 55, 61–62; and “suffering Saints,” 71–92, 180, 184, 186–187, 189, 261, 267 Mormon Reformation, 154 Mormonism, xviii–xix, 39, 130, 136, 145, 239, 244, 282–283; baptism for health, 65; and colonization of Arizona and Mexico, 262, 272–276; and communitarianism, 262, 277–278; and Council of Fifty, 331n6; descriptions by Kane, 62–63, 68–69, 81–85; and education, 262, 276–277; and fund-raising, 76–79; and Kane’s pamphlet The Mormons, 81– 85; and memory of Kane, xx, 284–285; and Mormon camps, 39, 42, 47–70; and party politics, 87, 94, 100, 103, 252; and questions of loyalty to government, 50, 55, 57, 59, 62–63, 67, 88–90, 261; and women, 83, 259, 265–267. See also antipolygamy legislation; Brigham Young;

344

Index

Mormonism (continued) Mormon Battalion; Mormon image; polygamy; Utah; Utah War Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, 204, 270 Morrison, Archibald, 18 Morton, Samuel George, 107 Mott, James, 143 Mott, Lucretia, 143 Motte, Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la, 210–211 Mountain Meadows Massacre, 159–160, 166–167, 202–205, 316–317n21 Musical Fund Society of Philadelphia, 6, 37 Native American Party, 32–33 Native Americans, 63, 86, 155, 160, 174– 175, 202–203, 244–245, 273 nativism, 31–33 Nauvoo, Illinois, 48, 55, 66, 71, 78–79, 82–83 Nauvoo Legion, 159, 161 Nelson, William, 216 New England Non-Resistance Society, 40 New Orleans, 14, 94, 155 New York, Lake Erie and Western Railroad and Coal Company, 254 New York City, 1–2, 74–75, 78, 103, 128– 129, 165, 198–199, 232, 244 New York Herald, 89–90, 102, 122, 193, 230, 241, 249 New York Historical Society, 199 New York Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, 38 New York Sun, 75 New York Tribune, xiv, 17, 73, 78–79, 106, 121–122, 167, 177, 192, 240 Newman, John Philip, 332n19 Noah, Mordecai Manual, 78 Norton, Charles Eliot, 250 Nott, Josiah C., 108–109 Orr, James L., 189 Osborne, Anthony, 165, 173

O’Sullivan, John L., 38, 40–41, 102–103 Owen, Robert, 139 pain, 38, 72–73, 80, 91–92, 241 Panama, 165 Paris, 15–28 Parkman, Francis, 26 patriarchal blessing, 66, 264 Patterson, Carlile Pollock, 245 Patterson, Henry S., 39 Patterson, Robert, 37 peace reform, 40–41, 102, 211–212 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 119–120 Pennsylvania Board of State Charities, xvii, 236–237, 246–248 Pennsylvania Free Soil Committee, 97–98 Pennsylvania Freeman, 38, 115, 118, 120, 124 Pennsylvania Historical Society, 81 Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, 127 Pennsylvanian, 35–36, 39, 75, 87, 121 Phelps, John W., 176 Phelps, William W., 191 Philadelphia, 1–2, 4–5, 23, 39, 104, 161, 209; described by Kane, 44–45; education in, 138–140; free blacks in, 94, 117, 226; Free Soil politics in, 99–100; high society, 39, 135–136; Mormons in, 47, 77, 299n1; newspapers in, 44, 74–75, 79– 80; poverty in, 139–140; riots of 1844, 31–33; and Underground Railroad, 127 Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, 243 Philadelphia Society for Promoting the Abolition of Capital Punishment, 38 Phillips, Wendell, 38, 84, 115 Pierce, Franklin, 101–102, 106, 153 Poland Act, 267–270 Polk, James K., 35–36, 42, 156; and Mormons, 49–55, 57–58, 63–65, 67, 77, 81, 94; reaction to Free Soil, 98–99; and Young America, 101–102 polygamy (plural marriage), 72–73, 77–78, 87–90, 145, 156–157, 266–267

Index popular sovereignty, 94, 105, 156, 158, 182 Porter, Fitz-John, 176–177, 179–181, 185, 319n11, 331n1 positivism, 22 Potter, John F., 216 Poussin, Guillaume Tell, 22 Powell, Lazarus, 190 Pratt, Eleanor McComb, 191 Pratt, Orson, 89, 332n19 Pratt, Parley P., 191, 321n43 Pratt, Romania Bunnell, 276 Presbyterianism, xv–xvi, 4, 6–7, 17, 34, 45, 75–76, 134, 282 presidential campaigns: in 1828, 4–5; in 1844, 34–36; in 1848, 94–100; in 1860, 211; in 1864, 232 Preston, Ann, 144–145 Price, Eli K., 200, 244, 269–272 print culture, 36–37, 73–74 Pryor, Roger A., 216 Quakers, 6, 25, 37, 45, 121, 143 Quincy, Josiah, Jr., 78–79 railroads: in Alleghenies, 138, 164–165, 254–255; in Mexico, 274; transcontinental, 83, 156, 170, 277; in Utah, 259 Reconstruction, 236, 248–253, 258 reform: antebellum movements, xv–xviii, 13, 28–30, 34, 36, 246–247, 295n4; during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, xviii, 141, 236–237, 246–247; literature of, 80, 82–84; and manliness, 124–125, 210; and print culture, xvii, 37, 73–74, 91; and suffering, 80. See also anti-evangelical, Democratic reform; Democratic Party; evangelical reform; individual reforms; romanticism religious liberty, xviii–xix, 33, 48, 69–70, 72–73, 75, 77, 84, 281; and Utah War, 149–150, 160. See also under Democratic Party Republic (Washington, D.C.), 87

345

Republican Party, xv–xvii, 97, 106, 121–122, 156; and boards of state charities, 246; and Civil War, 207, 212, 226–228; Radical Republicans, 248–250, 252, 258–259; and Reconstruction, 236, 248–253; and temperance, 241–242; and Utah War, 156, 158 Revolutions of 1848, 17, 103 Reynolds, George, 279–280 Richards, Franklin D., 84 Richards, Josephine, 191 Richards, Samuel W., 159 Richards, Willard, 65, 68 Robison, Lewis, 180 Rockwell, Porter, 174, 187, 319n1 romantic hero, xix–xx, 17, 48, 70, 103, 125, 236, 274–275, 283, 312n33, 335n51 romanticism, 7, 12, 34, 38, 73; and chivalry, 209–210; and democracy, 40–41, 93, 102, 112; and nature and the West, 41, 47, 56–57, 138, 238–239, 255, 273–273; and reform, xvi, 29–31, 68, 257, 285 Rothermel, Peter, 227, 233–235 Rush, Benjamin, 37 Rynders, Isaiah, 126 Sacramento Transcript, 85 salles d’asiles (infant schools), 16, 138–141 Salt Lake City, 53, 262–264, 278; federal troops in, 258; Mormon college in, 277; and Utah War, xiv–xiv, 159–162, 167, 170, 173–174, 176, 180–182, 184–192, 199 San Bernardino, California, 159, 165–167, 202, 239 San Francisco, 64, 165 Sanborn, Franklin B., 246 Schurz, Carl, 250 science, professionalization of, 108 Scipio (Kane’s servant), 226 Scott, Thomas A., 254 Scott, Walter, 210, 324n7 Scott, Winfield, 42, 157 Sedgwick, Theodore, 78

346

Index

sexuality, 145–148 Shaffer, John Wilson, 329n22 Shields, Charles W., 4, 23, 268 Shipp, Margaret C., 334n46 Shipps, Jan, 285 Shunk, Francis, 36, 40 Sintram and His Companions (Motte), 210–11, 219, 230, 324n9 slavery, 14, 81, 109, 121–122, 204; and border South, 114; and Democratic Party, xvi, xvii, 30, 34, 94–96, 113, 211; and new territories, 73, 85, 94–98, 105; and racial mixing, 107–110; and “suffering slave,” 80, 83. See also antislavery Slocum, Henry W., 228 Smethport, Pennsylvania, 243–244 Smith, George A., 168–169, 188, 191, 197, 272, 279, 316–317n21 Smith, George Albert, 284 Smith, Gerrit, 31 Smith, Hyrum, 48, 71–72 Smith, John, 66 Smith, John Henry, 279 Smith, Joseph, 47–48, 71–72, 76, 88, 90 Snow, Eliza R., 191, 259 Snow, Erastus, 78 South, 14, 84, 97–98, 212; border regions of, 113–114; and chivalry, 210; connections with Philadelphia, 1, 209; gentry of, 208–209, 221–222; and honor, xix, 125, 178–179, 208, 235; and politics, 94– 95, 105, 211; poor whites of, 107, 221–222; reconciliation with after Civil War, 233, 236, 248–252 Southern Literary Messenger, 84 Spencer, Orson, 75–76 St. George, Utah, 264, 266 St. Louis, Missouri, 55–56 St. Louis Republican, 192 Staines, William C., 168, 187–188, 318n46 Stanton, Edwin, 221, 224, 226, 228, 230 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 69 Steele, John H., 52

Stenhouse, T. B. H., 258, 331n1 Steptoe, Edward Jenner, 153 Stevens, Thaddeus, 119 Stiles, George P., 154 Still, William, 118–119, 127 Stone, Roy, 225 Stout, Hosea, 58, 125 Strang, James J., 76 Stuart, J. E. B., 225 suffering. See pain Sully, Thomas, 2–4, 121 Sumner, Charles, 78, 84, 98–99, 119–121, 252 Sunbury and Erie Railroad, 164–165 Swedish immigrants, 241, 274 Tappan, Arthur, 95 Tappan, Benjamin, 95–96 Tappan, Lewis, 78, 95–96 Taylor, Charles F., 216, 222–223 Taylor, John, 136, 275–276, 278–280 Taylor, Zachary, 47, 88, 94, 98–99, 126 temperance reform, xvii, 236–237, 241–243 Texas annexation, 34–35, 94–96 Thomas, Ann, 232 Tilden, Samuel J., 96 Train, George Francis, 69 Trist, Nicholas P., 157 Twain, Mark, 210 Tyler, John, 20, 34, 150 Tyler, Robert, 150 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 106, 116 Underground Railroad, 127 United Order of Enoch, 277 University of Virginia, 9, 19, 209 Upshur, Abel P., 20 Utah, 67, 83, 236; attempts at statehood, 81, 85–86, 152–153, 155, 196–198, 258– 259, 262, 265, 279–280; disputes between territorial officials and Mormons, 86–91, 150, 153–156, 258; probate courts, 154; settlement, 64, 83; territorial gov-

Index ernment, 64, 73, 81, 85. See also Utah War Utah War: Buchanan’s decision to send army, 156–158; connections with Civil War, 149–150, 315n2; events immediately after, 194–204; events leading to, 151–156; Kane’s decision to intervene, 150–151, 160–163, 205–206; Kane’s journey to Utah, 165–167; Kane meets with Mormons, 167–171; Kane’s narratives about, 151, 180, 182–185, 195–196, 205; Kane’s visit to Camp Scott, 170–187; Mormon preparations for, 170; Move South, 180–181, 184–186, 188–189, 191, 194; peace commissioners, 192–193, 201; press reactions to end of, 192–193; resolution of, 187–191; significance of, xii–xiv, 249–250 Valley Tan, 197 Van Buren, Martin, 4–5, 34–35, 93, 95–101 Van Dyke, James C., 161–162 Van Rensselaer, Alida, 2 Vancouver Island, 64, 180 vigilantism, 166–167, 242–243 Vigny, Alfred De, 22 Virginia, 8–9, 94, 209, 217, 221–223 Voto, Bernard De, 30–31 Wallace, Horace Binney, 23 Wallace, William A., 247 Warsaw Signal, 79 Washington, D.C., 4–5, 49–55, 99, 154– 155, 160–162, 194–198 Washington Territory, 245 Washington Union, 195 Webb, Ann Eliza, 268 Webster, Daniel, 4 Wells, Daniel H., 189–190, 201 West, 15, 28, 41, 123, 196, 238, 245; and Mormons, xiii, 48–49, 72–74, 81, 85– 86, 150; and racial politics, 93, 110–112 West Indies, 12, 105, 108–110, 251

347

Wheeler, John H., 120–121 Whig Party: and antislavery, 93, 97–101, 105–106; and evangelical reform, xv–xvi, 7, 29–30, 32, 38, 95, 102, 285; influence on Republican Party, 251; newspaper, 87; and politics, 34–36, 86, 94 Whitman, Walt, 96 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 38, 84–85 Williams, Alpheus, 209, 230, 233 Williams, Euphemia, 116 Williamson, Passmore, 120–123, 211 Wilmot, David, 96–97, 99–100, 102 Wilson, Alexander, 195, 202, 205 Winter Quarters, Nebraska, 48, 76 Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 241, 284 women’s rights, 36, 124, 141–148 Wood, Harriet Kane, 15–16, 128–129 Wood, William, 15, 128–131, 133–134, 160–161, 268–270; correspondence with Kane on slavery, 106, 115, 117, 119, 127 Woodruff, Wilford, 58–59, 61, 64, 167–170, 188, 280–281 Worthen, Lafayette Shaw (Fay), 321n41 Yale University, 2, 9, 13 Young, Brigham, 48, 64, 111, 237; appointed Utah governor, 73, 86–88; charged by Judge James McKean, 260– 262; colonization of Mexico, 273–276; communitarianism of, 277; correspondence with Kane, 66, 69, 71, 82, 131–132, 257–258; criticized by Elizabeth Kane, 267; death of, 278–279; and Kane’s visit to Utah, 262–265; and Mormon Battalion, 53, 58–59; and Mormon education, 276–277; and Mormon fund-raising, 76–77; and Mountain Meadows Massacre, 202–204, 316–317n21; photo of, 169; polygamy of, 77, 89, 267–268; relationship with Kane, 259–260, 278, 331n6; ring given to by Kane, 68; as romantic hero, 335n51; succession, 259–

348

Index

Young, Brigham (continued) 260, 278–279; and Utah War, xiv–xvi, 149, 151–155, 158–163, 167–171, 174–175, 179–181, 185, 187–205; will, 262, 270– 272, 333n35 Young, Brigham, Jr., 237, 257–258, 272, 279

Young, John Willard, 258–260, 278, 331n6 Young America, 93, 101–103, 105, 111–112, 273 Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, 277