President Buchanan’s Loyalty

President Buchanan's Loyalty

By Joseph A. West

It is an interesting and remarkable fact, that the man who questioned "Mormon" loyalty, in 1857, and sent an army to Utah to suppress a supposed "Mormon" rebellion, should have his own loyalty questioned by no less an authority than a distinguished senator of the United States. It will be remembered that the "Mormons" first settled, as a religious body, in Kirtland, Ohio, where they built a city and a temple, all of which they were compelled to abandon. They later found a home in Jackson county, Missouri. From Jackson county they were compelled to flee into Clay county, and thence into Caldwell county, of that state, and from the latter place, to Illinois, where once more- they built, on the banks of the Mississippi river, a beautiful city which they called Nauvoo, and a still more magnificent temple than the first. In 1844, their Prophet and Patriarch were foully murdered, while under the State's sacred pledge of protection. The people were again compelled to flee for their lives, abandon their homes, their city and temple. This time they fled into the western wilderness, among savages, since there was no other place for them to go within the confines of civilization. They had appealed to the officials of many states in the Union, and to the general Government, setting forth the wrongs which they had endured and asking for protection, but all turned a deaf ear to their petitions. President Van Buren alone replied, stating that their cause was just, but that he could do nothing for them. Their next rallying place was the valley of the Great Salt Lake, in what was then graphically designated The Great American Desert. After a brief respite of about ten years, they were again ruthlessly assailed, not by local, irresponsible mobs, nor mobs under the guise of state militia as before, but by the Government of the United States, acting on the false information that the "Mormons" were in open rebellion to its authority and that they were guilty of certain illegal acts which, according to the testimony of their own investigating committee, were never committed. It availed the "Mormons" nothing that in the darkest hours of their western migration they had promptly met the demands of the Government for five hundred men to fight in

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its battles with Mexico,and that in the name of the United States, they had taken possession of the very country they were then inhabiting, and had raised the Stars and Stripes as an evidence to all the world of their devotion to and love for the institutions of the very country from which they had been so lately and ruthlessly expatriated. An army was quickly and quietly assembled without stopping to investigate the truth of the statements that had given rise to the expedition, and immediately sent to Utah with the same avowed, hostile purpose that had characterized all former "Mormon" persecutions, the utter destruction of the "Mormon" Church and people. News of the army's coming was brought by couriers to the Latter-day Saints who were assembled in large numbers in one of the canyons of the Wasatch mountains, peacefully and happily celebrating the anniversary of the entrance of the pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley, under the folds of the Stars and Stripes, the flag they lovingly honored on all their public occasions. Brigham Young, their modern Moses, and the legally constituted Governor of the Territory by presidential appointment, soon placed the Territory under martial law and called upon the militia to prevent the unlawful invasion of this hostile force, the purpose of whose coming none could know, since there had been no official notification. The action was taken in order that the Government and Country at large might have time and opportunity to learn the true situation. His masterful policy worked like a charm, and the army did not enter the Salt Lake Valley, until it came as a peaceful posse comitatus. It then passed some forty miles beyond Salt Lake City, establishing itself at Camp Floyd, named after the then Secretary of War, through whose instrumentality this movement was mainly undertaken, and who later became one of the arch traitors of the Union, taking with him one million dollars from the U. S. Treasury which he later placed in the Treasury of the Confederacy. At this late day, so far removed from these days of "Mormon" persecution, it may seem unaccountable that such scenes as I have described could possibly take place in this great country of ours, and under the flag of our glorious government which has so lately given the world such an exalted example of its devotion to the cause of human freedom, but it must be remembered that human nature is very much the same in every day and time, and that the true Church of Christ has ever been the object of the most bitter persecution because it has usually been so much at varience with the prevailing beliefs of mankind. Hence the memorable saying of the Savior, "Blessed

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are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; . . for so persecuted they the proph- .

ets which were before you." But to return to the main purpose of this communication. Mrs. Harriett J. Johnson, of Baltimore, a niece of President Buchanan, and the hostess of the White House during his administration, created by her will a fund now amounting to one hundred thousand dollars for the erection, in the City of Washington, of a memorial to James Buchanan, the fifteenth president of the United States, said fund to be available until the 18th day of July, 1918; when, if not used it was to be returned to the legatees of the estate. A resolution providing for the use of this fund came up in the Senate on the 14th of June, last. The political life and character of James Buchanan was at that time discussed at length by the members of that distinguished body. Senator Lodge of Massachusetts, and other distinguished senators, accused Buchanan of filling his cabinet with secession sympathizers, some of whom later joined the Confederacy, and allowing them to send large consigments of arms and ammunition into the Southern States, and of purposely scattering the few loyal troops, then comprising the army into distant localities, so that they could not be made available when the then impending crisis came. The most distant point to which these troops were sent was Utah, and this expedition comprised the flower of the American army, at the time. Senator Lodge's speech, fortified as it is by quotations from the leading historians and statesmen of the times, is now interesting reading, especially in view of the tarnished name that came to Utah and the "Mormons," through the mal-administration of this man Buchanan. The Senator clearly points out that if Buchanan was not a traitor to his country during the early stages preceding the great Civil War, at least he did the very things that a traitor would do under the circumstances. In his public utterance he claimed that no state had a right to secede from the Union, and at the same time held that the General Government had no right to prevent it, that to invade a state for the purpose, was a violation of state sovereignty, as no United States Army could legally enter the confines of a state without the consent of the state authorities. Senator ICnox, in reply, quoted President Lincoln as follows: "The marching of an army into South Carolina, without the consent of her people, and with hostile intent towards them, would be invasion; and it would be coercion if South Carolina were forced to submit." Still Buchanan did this very thing in sending the army in-

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to the territory of Utah. Brigham Young's stand, therefore, in forbidding it from crossing the territorial boundary was fully justified from the standpoint of these two men, unless, indeed, it be the accepted doctrine that the people of a Territory have no rights that the general Government is bound to respect. The chief topic of Buchanan's inaugural address was the decision of the United States in the Dread Scott Case, and its far reaching effects, claiming that it virtually settled the slave question, declaring the institution a national one, and that "the black man had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The Dread Scott Decision certainly did make the fugitive slave law the law of the land, and doubtless it would have so continued until the constitution should be amended, had not the overt act of South Carolina in firing upon the flag at Fort Sumter, placed it in open rebellion, and at war with the United States. Senator Lodge and those who took sides with him, claimed that this might have been averted had Buchanan taken the stand that Andrew Jackson did a few years before. Upon this point Senator Lodge said:

The great crisis came to him, the greatest crisis that any American President had ever met. There was no room to doubt; he had before him the example of his own chosen leader; he had nothing to do but to follow in his footsteps; it was not a question of coercing a state; iC was not a question of secession; it was the question whether he would be true to the oath he had sworn to the American people to enforce the laws of the United States. That was the whole question. It mattered not whether the south was right or wrong or whether the north was right or wrong, or who was to blame; there was one man in this country who had but one duty to perform and that was the duty of the President of the United States. However others might differ, he had but one duty to sustain the Government and enforce the laws as he had sworn to — do He shrank away; he made the great refusal and allowed us to drift hopelessly on the rocks. * * * I do not say that if he had done his duty as Jackson did, he could have averted the Civil War; probably that awful convulsion was inevitable; but he at least could have vindicated the right and the honor of the Government with which he was charged. Instead of turning the Government over to his successor, a penniless wreck, he could at least have turned it over in a strong condition, with a strong policy already mapped out, and in such a way as to have united every force behind it. He failed to do this. The shadow of disloyalty rested upon Buchanan at the time and it has rested upon him ever since.*

The resolution was finally passed by a small majority. Brigham City, Utah.

*For discussion see Congressional Record, June 14, and 17, 1918, numbers 155, 157, Vol. 56, pp. 8430, 8571-2.