5. Kane to Young, September 24, 1850.
Kane to Young, September 24, 1850
81
him, and a brandy-soaked towel on his head. He hoped his writing, despite his
pain, might achieve a cool and detached style. When the time for his presen-
tation arrived, Kane told Young that he was carried to the lecture hall, where
he was aided by a strong sedative and a determined will. After a successful
delivery of the lecture, he collapsed on the way home and remained prostrate
for several days.6
Kane’s lecture had polish, restrained emotion, and interesting anecdote
and detail—all told through the eyes of a supposedly neutral, on-the-scene
observer. He understood that, for his audience of opinion-makers, the most
effective advocacy was a soft voice that allowed readers to make their own judg-
ment. One passage described the city of Nauvoo, quiet and forlorn, after the
Mormon exodus.
I was descending the last hill-side upon my journey, when a landscape
in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend
of the river a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its
bright new dwellings, set in cool green gardens, ranging up around a
stately dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble marble edi-
fice, which high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The
city appeared to cover several miles, and beyond it, in the background,
there rolled off a fair country, checkered by the careful lines of fruit-
ful husbandry. The unmistakable marks of industry, enterprise, and
educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most
striking beauty.
This halcyon description ended with a sharp disjuncture. “I looked,” said
Kane, “and saw no one.”7
At the Mormon temple, he encountered armed men who boasted of their
ruthless expulsion of the Saints. Kane contrasted the violence of the vigilantes
with the suffering in the Mormon camps, interweaving specific anecdotes of
dying Mormons with more generalized descriptions of their suffering. Kane
wrote as a romantic humanitarian and presented the evocative: Mormon
virtue, Mormon suffering, the Mormon expulsion, and the idyllic Mormon
society in Utah. The result was a powerful public relations boost.
6. Kane to Y
oung, September 24, 1850. On Kane’s health, see also Bernhisel to Young, July 3,
1850, BYOF.
7. Kane, Mormons, 26.
82
the prOphet and the refOrmer
Hoping to influence the nation’s perceptions of the Saints at this criti-
cal political juncture, Bernhisel urged Kane to quickly publish the lecture.
Kane, who generally operated in his reform campaigns through anonymous
and pseudonymous letters and editorials placed in sympathetic newspapers,
initially demurred, as “It is contrary to my Rule to print anything of literary
pretension over my signature.”8 Nevertheless, he soon accepted Bernhisel’s
argument and published the lecture as a pamphlet. At first, 1,000 copies
were issued, “very handsomely got up,” at a cost of about $150, which Kane
apparently bore. By July, another edition of 1,000 copies was published. Kane
helped with the circulation, sending a copy to each U.S. senator and up to
three-quarters of the congressmen, who reportedly were “highly pleased with
it.” Bernhisel sent copies to his personal friends, government leaders, librar-
ies, President Taylor, and to “corps editorial.”9
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 inter-
est “in you & your subject.” Kane’s father wrote that the pamphlet “made a
great sensation, and has fairly revolutionized public opinion.”10 Eli K. Price,
a prominent Philadelphia Quaker lawyer, commented to Kane, “I always
admired the feelings of humanity that led you to sympathise with and defend
them.”11 Kane’s friend and future father-in-law William Wood praised his style,
writing, “A great deal of true poetry in your descriptions. The impression on
the feelings is like that left by silvery moonlight or sunlight falling through
green foliage.”12
Literary magazines and newspapers throughout the nation lauded Kane’s
pamphlet and expressed sympathy for the Latter-day Saints, amplifying the
pamphlet’s message far beyond its limited circulation. The Southern Literary
Messenger, a magazine of the southern elite which two years earlier had published a highly critical article on Mormonism, praised Kane and proclaimed
the Mormons ready to “take their seats with our legislators in the national
8. Kane to Y
oung, September 24, 1850.
9. Bernhisel to Young, May 24, 1850 and July 3, 1850, BYOF.
10. Charles Sumner to Kane, December 27, 1850, Kane Collection, BYU; Wendell Phillips to Kane, November 19, 1851, Kane Collection, BYU; John K. Kane to Elisha K. Kane, January 27, 1851, Elisha K. Kane Papers, APS.
11. Eli K. Price to Kane, August 25, 1850, Kane Collection, BYU.
12. William Wood to Kane, October 9, 1850, Kane Collection, BYU.
Kane to Young, September 24, 1850
83
councils.” In his newspaper, Frederick Douglass described Kane’s pamphlet as
“entertaining, eloquent and exciting.” Douglass integrated the Mormon exam-
ple into his larger critique of “the feebleness of the American government in
protecting human rights, and the hollowness of that boast of civil and reli-
gious liberty.”13 It even reached an international audience. Charles Dickens’
magazine Household Words deemed his pamphlet “extremely interesting” and
the Edinburgh Review quoted Kane’s passages on Mormon suffering in an oth-
erwise highly negative article on Mormonism. The prominent English jour-
nalist Henry Mayhew included almost the entire pamphlet verbatim in his
1852 history of Mormonism.14
Apostle Orson Hyde relayed the Mormon reaction to Kane, lauding his
inspiration and predicting that the pamphlet “will forever immortalize your
name on the records, and in the memory of the Saints.”15 Young and his coun-
selors likewise thought it a “masterly effort” that would “redound to his credit
in all ages to come” and prayed that Kane would “live in the enjoyment of the
richest gifts of heaven, till this weary pilgrimage is done.”16
Kane’s pamphlet arrived in the hands of congressmen and newspaper edi-
tors 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 and to preserve the
Union. The “omnibus” of measures balanced sectional concerns by (1) the
establishment of northern and western boundaries of Texas and the agree-
ment not to admit states from a dismembered Texas; (2) the admission of
California as a free state; (3) the side-by-side organization of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah with the status of slavery to be determined
by
popular sovereignty; (4) the passage of a stringent fugitive slave law; and
(5) the prohibition of the slave trade in the nation’s capital.
The debate over the admission of Utah as a territory focused as much on
the implications for the slavery issue as on the peculiarities of Mormon theol-
ogy, theocracy, or rumored polygamy (though these issues likely doomed the
13. R
eview of The Mormons, Southern Literary Messenger 17 (March 1851): 170–174; Frederick Douglass, Review of The Mormons, The North Star, October 3, 1850.
14. “In the Name of the Prophet—Smith!” Household Words 3.69 (July 19, 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.
15. Orson Hyde to Kane, May 31, 1851, Kane Collection, BYU.
16. Young, Kimball, and Richards to Bernhisel, November 20, 1850, BYOF.
84
the prOphet and the refOrmer
statehood bid). Southerners, for instance, praised the proposed Constitution
of the State of Deseret for not mentioning slavery, while Free Soilers repeat-
edly sought to ban slavery from the proposed territory of Utah. Kane remained
too ill during the summer of 1850 to lobby during the congressional ses-
sions, though he likely gave Bernhisel and Babbitt backroom advice about
decision-makers and policy. Once again, he warned that the Mormons must
remain aloof from sectional controversy. The legislative package passed in
September 1850 and later became known as the Compromise of 1850.17
Notwithstanding the positive publicity from Kane’s pamphlet and the
combined lobbying of Bernhisel and Kane, the Compromise rejected the state
of Deseret and with it several of the Mormons’ most cherished hopes. Even
the uniquely Mormon name of “Deseret” had to be surrendered, as Congress
chose Utah as the name for the new territory. More disturbing to the Saints,
Congress severely pared the new territory’s proposed borders, rejecting the
Mormon argument that the territory must be expansive to support a popula-
tion in semi-arid conditions. The new borders, enclosing much of the present
states of Utah and Nevada, curbed Mormon ambitions and created artificial,
not topographical, boundaries on the north and south.
Source
Kane to Young “and his immediate advisers,” September 24, 1850, box
40, fd 10, BYOF. A draft of this letter is Kane to Young “and his immedi-
ate circle of friends,” ca. fall 1850, Kane Collection, Box 15, fd 1, BYU.
Letter
Private
(For Brigham Young only and his immediate advisers)
Philadelphia, Septem. 24. 1850.
My friends,
I write to you in haste, because I want to have it in my power to send
in the Mail with the letter I wrote the night before my departure,18 for
17
. Matthew J. Grow, “The Suffering Saints: Thomas L. Kane, Democratic Reform, and the Mormon Question in Antebellum America,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (Winter 2009): 681–710.
18. Kane to Young, July 11, 1850.
Kane to Young, September 24, 1850
85
the sea shore, one that will qualify it and assure you that I am not only
yet alive at this date, but greatly improved in health, and quite likely to
live, if only to swell the chapter of Mormon miracles.
I told you of my critical condition of last winter. It was at the period
of my worst hemorrhage that I found myself called upon by the rising
of the fresh batch of calumnies of the William Smith copartnership, to
get up something special for the troublesome people at Washington;
and, instead of pursuing my usual course of bringing out our differ-
ent seaboard newspapers, to edit something of a less fugitive nature.
I found that my editorials, however labored, had always to be renewed
on an average at least once in the quarter. The minds of general readers
were fatigued too, with the iteration of the same points of argument,
necessarily unavoidable within the limits of a leaded column. Opinion
besides, seemed ripe [p. 2] for something narrative and fanciful that
would challenge attention and carry its pleading by implication; and,
my illness itself, admonished me of the expediency of recording facts
in a sufficiently permanent form to serve as a reliable base of defence,
after I should be carried off the field. So I accepted the first eligible
invitation to deliver a Lecture that I received from a Literary Society,
stipulating that I would name my subject after my discourse was writ-
ten, and set to work to write them one. I gave myself four weeks: I was
full of my subject, but suffered so much from pain and weakness as to
be unable the major part of the time to hold a pen in my hand. However
at it I went, in spite of the entreaties of my friends and family who
thought me beside myself, and, if, through acute illness, I did miss any
one day, the night found me on hand, sitting up in my bed over a foot
bath of hot water maybe, with a kettle 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, trying to remember
this remote incident or recal that half forgotten fact or drowsy anecdote,
and then striving so to weave these all into my narrative, as to give the
whole not only a truthful but a light and good humored air, something
such as old Grimaldi the clown put on when he took care to dance with
most spirit when his gout was [p. 3] at its worst.19 I was done before my
time, and, true to my engagement, had myself carried to the Lecture
19. J
oseph Grimaldi, a famous clown, was forced to end his career due to gout. See Andrew Scott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2010).
86
the prOphet and the refOrmer
Hall before my audience assembled, and came out upon them with
“The Mormons.” Having taken a strong drug to diminish the action of
the heart and circulation, (and being, as I am superstitious enough to
believe, spiritually sustained,) I was able to speak forty minutes by the
watch without hemorrhage.20 But, after it was over, 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. Yet, again I rallied;—
and enough to correct the proofs and perform other labor upon Two
Editions which I put through the press, (*)21 though by the Medical
men this was thought the struggle of a moribund and nothing more.
Now mark the change. The Second Thousand through, I left my other
work to take care of itself and went off to Newport. From that moment
as if it was a signal given, my health seemed to undergo a change. My
most sanguine anticipation was that I should perhaps be able to recruit
strength enough to make it safe for me to visit the West [p. 4] Indies
in the winter. I have so recruited that I do not think I shall need to go
to the West Indies, at all. What the Doctors say, I do not care; I know
that my cough has left m
e, and my Ague too, and that I have strength
enough to return to my business and work at it with ability. If I can
lighten my tasks, a little ease and attention to health will very probably
restore me permanently, and even invite for me all the blessings my
good old friend the Patriarch invoked upon my head.22
I have just returned from Washington, where I was called immediately
after my return from Newport, to use my influence with Mr. Fillmore in
favor of the nominations for Utah. Dr. Bernhisel has promised me to
20. In mid-nineteenth-century America, a medication used to decrease the blood flow was the combination of ergot, a fungus, and digitalis, a bell-shaped flower. (See “Ergot and Digitalis in Hemorrhage,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 55 (1857): 88.) A newspaper remarked that Kane’s “large and intelligent” audience listened with the “closest attention.”
Furthermore, his lecture was “well calculated to win a feeling of sympathy . . . [and] to remove in the minds of his hearers the prejudice existing against this people.” “The Mormons.
Lecture of J. [ sic] L. Kane, Esq., before the Historical Society,” Pennsylvania Inquirer and National Gazette, March 28, 1850, 2.
21. Kane’s note: “(*) It is contrary to my Rule to print anything of literary pretension over my signature, and I embraced this opportunity of expressing to some of you my regard.
I hope therefore you have received the copies sent you by Mail of the Pamphlet form.” In part, Kane wrote anonymously to protect his standing as a 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. See Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001).
22. On Kane’s patriarchal blessing, see Kane to Young, September 10, 1846.
Kane to Young, September 24, 1850
87
give you the details of this as well as your other affairs of the same kind,
and I have only therefore to give weight to his statements, by express-
ing my regret that your interests should have suffered by the improper
conduct of Mr. A. W. Babbit. It was incumbent upon me, however before
The Prophet and the Reformer Page 13