slate of officers would have put church leaders firmly in control: Young, gov-
ernor; Willard Richards, secretary of state; Heber C. Kimball, chief justice;
and Newel K. Whitney (presiding bishop) and John Taylor (apostle), associ-
ate judges. To present the petition in Washington, church leaders selected
John M. Bernhisel, a quiet-spoken, 50-year-old doctor who had attended the
University of Pennsylvania. The Saints also sought Kane’s assistance in lob-
bying Congress and Richards authorized him to modify the proposed territo-
rial borders if necessary.4 Following Bernhisel’s departure, Mormon leaders
received a letter from Kane, dated November 26, 1848 and now lost, which
apparently did not arrive in Utah until July 1, 1849.5 Kane’s letter—presumably
telling of his final interview with Polk and his advice to seek statehood rather
than territorial status—immediately transformed Mormon thinking. Mormon
leaders likened the news in his letter to “the revolutions of kingdoms” that
“operated like the harvest shower on the earth.”6
Kane’s mood and advice were recorded by Apostle Wilford Woodruff who
met with Kane, along with Bernhisel, in Philadelphia in late 1849. According
to Woodruff, Kane warned of the inevitable tensions that would arise between
Mormon officials and outside territorial appointees, which would create the
turmoil of two side-by-side governments: federal administration and church
rule. Rather than accept such a prospect—“You owe . . . [the national gov-
ernment] nothing but kicks, currs and the treatment of wicked dogs, for that
is the only treatment you have received from their hands”—Kane advised
Mormon leaders to abandon their goal of a territorial government led by local
leaders and to work instead toward statehood. The previous year, Kane had
left the Democratic Party for the fledgling Free Soil movement, which was
dedicated to halting the expansion of slavery into the territories acquired in
the Mexican–American War. The defeat of the Free Soil Party in the presi-
dential election of 1848 had darkened Kane’s assessment of American poli-
tics. “All the Parties with the whole of Congress,” Kane warned, “is a mass of
Corruption & abomination . . . governed by party management without any
regard to principle.” Statehood would empower the Mormons, he suggested,
3. Dale L.
Morgan, The State of Deseret (reprint, Logan: Utah State University Press, 1987), 26.
4. Journal History, May 2, 1849.
5. Orson F. Whitney, History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1892), 1:392.
6. Willard Richards to Kane, July 25, 1849, Willard Richards Papers, CHL.
Kane to Young, July 11, 1850
69
figure 12.1 John M. Bernhisel.
Source: Reproduced by permission from the Utah State Historical Society.
while territorial status would leave them vulnerable to the whims of the cor-
rupt national parties.
Notwithstanding his antislavery convictions, Kane issued strict instructions
for the Mormons to stay aloof from eastern factions agitating over slavery. The sectional quagmire, he believed, could engulf the Saints’ political ambitions. Mormon objectives could best be met by building a broad-based coalition in which no easterner saw the Mormons as a political enemy. The Saints would have to tread care-
fully because of the national political chaos, as “Parties are all breaking up And New ones forming and no man Can tell what a day will bring.” In addition, Kane
advised, “Brigham Young should be your Govornor. His head is not filled with
Law Books and Lawyers tactics but he has power to see through men & things.”7
To the persecution-weary Mormons, Kane’s warnings of hostile territo-
rial officers in their midst seemed almost apocalyptic, especially if such offi-
cers were drawn from the U.S. military. For half a dozen years they had been
7 . Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, November 25–26, 1849, December 4, 1849, 3: 501.
70
the prOphet and the refOrmer
hearing rumors (many coming from Kane) of a U.S. army action against
them, first in Nauvoo, then during the Iowa and Nebraska exodus, and now
in Utah. The latest news was all the more alarming because of their trust in
Kane. Within weeks of receiving the July mail, Mormon leaders embarked
on a new course. Accepting Kane’s plan, they abandoned the idea of a territo-
rial government and adopted a determined, almost panic-stricken quest for
statehood. Their vehicle was the establishment of a provisional government,
called “Deseret” (a Book of Mormon term meaning honeybee and symbol-
izing industry). In the context of the still shaky American hold over the west,
they hoped to force the issue of statehood by implying the possibility or reality
of independence. Texas had succeeded with a similar tactic, and California was
employing it at that very moment. Earlier, the ephemeral “state” of Franklin
(embryonic Tennessee) and, later, Oregon may have hastened the process of
statehood with similar maneuvers.8
When the Mormons submitted their State of Deseret constitution to
Washington, they provided a list of qualifying events which had supposedly
occurred between February and July 1849, including a constitutional conven-
tion. None of these events had actually taken place. Anxious to slow the hostile
policies of Polk and his successor, Whig Zachary Taylor, and worried about
getting a response to Washington as quickly as possible given the poor over-
land communications, Mormon officials had invented each of these incidents,
apparently hoping that their will might be taken for the deed. The proposed
state occupied the central core of the Intermountain West, far larger than con-
temporary Utah. Again, the Saints petitioned that their religious leaders also
serve in the secular positions: Young as governor, Kimball as lieutenant gov-
ernor, Richards as secretary of state, and a group of second-tier Mormons as
members of the legislature and judiciary.9
“The little sapling, then in form of territorial government, has assumed
the features of the mountain pine, under the name of the State of Deseret,”
Richards wrote Kane in late July 1849. He assured Kane that the Saints intended
to follow his advice by remaining apart from sectional controversy: “Of slav-
ery, anti-slavery, Wilmot provisos, etc., we, in our organization, have remained
silent.”10 The Saints also tried to appear not “too Mormon” by selecting Almon
8. M
organ, State of Deseret, 7–8.
9. Peter Crawley, “The Constitution of the State of Deseret,” Brigham Young University Studies 29 (Fall 1989): 7–22.
10. Richards to Kane, July 25, 1849. The shift in Mormon policy is illustrated by the contrast between this letter with another sent to Kane two and a half months earlier, which had expressed a desire for territorial government; see Richards to Kane, May 2, 1849.
Kane to Young, July 11, 1850
71
Babbitt as the State of Deseret’s representative to Washington. Babbitt, a nom-
inal church member and partisan Democrat, seemed a good choice to meet
congressmen on their terms. “I dont care if he drinks Champagne & knocks
over a few Lawyers & Priests all right—he
has a right to fight in hell,” said
Young with a rhetorical flourish.11
During the negotiations for a Utah government, the Mormons had three
representatives in Washington: Kane, Babbitt, and Bernhisel. In Kane’s mind,
Young had made an error in his choice of Babbitt, whom he saw as a “small
politician but a rough one.” This censure deepened as the congressional ses-
sion went forward. Kane complained that Babbitt “made light of his religion,”
associated “freely with a rabble of dissolute persons,” and was not only a “bad
man, but a very weak one,” whose antics had “disgusted serious and sober
men of both sides.”12
In contrast, Kane praised Bernhisel highly. While the choice of Babbitt as
the State of Deseret’s representative technically put Bernhisel on the sidelines
(his assignment was to represent Utah’s request for a territorial government),
Bernhisel took lodging at the National Hotel—“the centre of politics, fashion,
and folly”—and began to cultivate Washington’s opinion-makers, who eventu-
ally would praise him by citing small virtues: he was dutiful, selfless, and an
unpretentious gentleman.13 While Kane at first also described him narrowly,
citing his “modest good sense” and “careful purpose to do right,” he came to a
broader estimation. Many Washington politicians were “faster horses for the
Quarter heat,” Kane thought. Yet “I do not think I know another Member [of
Congress] of whom I could assert with equal confidence that, in all his career,
he has not committed one grave mistake or been betrayed into a single false
position.”14 For his part, Bernhisel described Kane as a “shrewd politician.”15
The Mormon petition for statehood arrived in Congress during the tumul-
tuous debates over the fate of slavery in the newly acquired territories. To solve the national north–south crisis, President-elect Zachary Taylor floated the idea
of admitting California and Utah as a single state with no mention of slavery,
but with the understanding that the new unit would likely be a free state.
11. Brigham Y
oung, remarks, July 8, 1849, General Church Minutes, CHL. On Babbitt, see
Walker, “The Affair of the ‘Runaways,’ ” 4–5.
12. Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, November 25–26, 1849; Kane to Young, September 24, 1850; Kane to Young, Kimball, and Richards, February 19, 1851.
13. Bernhisel to Young, March 21, 1850, BYOF.
14. Kane to Young, September 24, 1850, January 5, 1855.
15. Bernhisel to Young, March 21, 1850.
72
the prOphet and the refOrmer
A free California–Utah might thereby balance the large and recently admit-
ted pro-slavery state of Texas; each state would be subdivided in the future.16
The plan was to get the issue of slavery out of the halls of Congress and leave
it to local determination. When Californians rejected the proposal, Taylor, no
longer having a reason to restrain his feelings about the Mormons, reportedly
called them a “pack of out-laws” and unfit for self-government, either as a
territory or a state.17 Nevertheless, the president may have considered admit-
ting Utah to the union outside of the combined California–Utah plan. In his
February 19, 1851 letter to Young, Kane indicated that Taylor considered a slate
of officers for a proposed Utah territory.18
As Congress continued to debate the future of the Mormons in the west,
Kane wrote the following letter to Young. Suffering again from serious ill-
ness, he was about to leave Philadelphia for the resort town of Newport,
Rhode Island, in an attempt to regain health. In the letter, Kane reflected on
his illness, his relationship and history with the Saints, and his fear of death.
Should he die, he promised the Saints two items: his heart “to be deposited
in the Temple of your Salt Lake City, that, after death, it may repose, where in
metaphor at least it often was when living”; and a manuscript history of his
relationship with them.
Source
Kane to Young and “my dear friends,” July 11, 1850, box 40, fd 10, BYOF.
An earlier draft of this letter is Kane to “My dear friends,” undated,
Kane Collection, Box 16, fd 31, BYU.
Letter
Philadelphia, July 11. 1850.
My dear friends, all of you,
I am on the eve of departing on a journey to the Eastward, and
am surrounded by circumstances of annoying bustle and confusion.
Yet I compel myself to devote some of my moments to a letter to you,
16. B. H.
Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, vol. 3 (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 437–439; Morgan, State of Deseret, 39.
17. Babbitt to Young, July 7, 1850, BYOF.
18. Kane to Young, February 19, 1851.
Kane to Young, July 11, 1850
73
because long as it has been since I have written, it may perchance be
even longer before I am able to write you at length again.
You have no doubt wondered why it has been so long, and why, when
you knew me to be still engaged in the advocacy of your cause, I did
not accept a regular correspondence with you as soon as the opening of
reliable modes of communication invited me to give up my custom of
sending you oral messages. The reason was, that, when that auspicious
season arrived, I found my constitution wretchedly impaired. [p. 2] I had
been ordered by the Medical Faculty19 to give up every kind of labori-
ous occupation and devote myself entirely to the care of my health, but,
finding the evils they threatened as a consequence of disobedience, did
not visit me as early as was predicted, I continued to struggle on; know-
ing to be sure, my strength must ultimately give way, but wishing to die
in the fight and with my harness on.20 Unhappily, there has resulted at
last from the effects of over fatigue and the Old Platte Country Ague
together,21 something which looks like a Decline complicated with dis-
ease of the throat or lungs. This last winter, it was peremptorily ruled
that I should go to the West Indies; and, refusing to do so, I took a
bad cough and in the course of the month of February spat blood and
manifested other discouraging symptoms of fatal disease.22—At length
I am forced to go to Newport as a sort of last resource, but I have hardly
strength to carry me there.23
Under these circumstances, you will not wonder that I found it eas-
ier to keep silent than to [p. 3] write you uncandidly and with a reserve
19. Kane likely referred to the faculty at the University of P
ennsylvania Medical School, to
whom his brother Elisha Kane had ties. The Philadelphia Inquirer observed that “the reputation of this truly eminent and time-honored Institution was never greater than now. The Faculty embodies ability, experience, learning, and industry.” “The Annual Session of the Medical Department,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 3, 1850, 2.
20. John Kane had reportedly told Thomas’s older brother Elisha, who also suffered from various physical ailments, “if you must die, die in the harness.” Corner, Doctor Kane, 25.
21. A reference to Kane’s illness in the Mormon camps in August 1846.
22. Though Kane did not go to the West In
dies at this time, he traveled there on two other occasions (1839 or 1840 and 1853) to improve his health. Bernhisel had earlier informed Young that Kane’s physicians had “ordered him to the West Indies” and that his health was
“so critical a situation that he and his friends almost entirely despair of his recovery.” See Grow, Liberty to the Downtrodden, 105, 108–110; Bernhisel to Young, March 27, 1850, BYOF.
23. For a history of Newport, Rhode Island, as a nineteenth-century resort town, see Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Sprints, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 40–74.
74
the prOphet and the refOrmer
as to my personal condition, and easier still than to give you what wd. be
painful tidings. For so it is, my dear friends, and we have both felt it, our
relations have much changed from what Fortune and Mr. Polk seemed
originally to intend them to be. I thought myself near enough to some
of you, when you bade me God speed, beyond the Missouri; but in
little more than a month after, I was committed beyond recovery to
the course which I had afterwards to pursue, and then, from being your
friend, in the sense of your Second in an affair of honor, it happened that
the personal assaults upon myself made your cause become so identi-
fied with my own that your vindication became my own defence and
as “partners in iniquity,” (to quote one particular blackguard of those
times) we had to stand or fall, together. This probation it is, that has
made me feel our brotherhood, and taught me, in the nearly four years,
that have elapsed since I left the Camp where your kind nursing saved
my life,24 to know from the heart, that I love you, and that you love me
in turn.—It has been no vain assumption in me to believe that it would
grieve you to know of my suffering and misfortune [p. 4] as much as
surely I should grieve at yours. On this account, then, I have been back-
ward to acquaint you with such, where I thought no substantial good
was to be thus attained.
I had indeed hoped we were thus to be friends for many a good
long day, and that we should live to exchange kind messages between
Philadelphia and Deseret when both places knew us as old men. But
The Prophet and the Reformer Page 11