Joseph Smith: and Texas Issues

JOSEPH SMITH— AND TEXAS ISSUES How the Southern Policy of Seizing Missouri, California, and Texas for Slavery Was Matured Long Before the Settlement Era in the Great West By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" III In a store window in Chicago, as these lines are written, stands a drawing of a group of men. Each is symbolical of an American state. One of the men is a giant, hugely overshadowing all the others. This giant is labelled "Texas." The display celebrates Texas' great size. Concerning Texas we all know that it was the first territory to come into the American union as the result of domestic war for terri- torial expansion. True, the war was irregular. Americans just went to Texas, revolted from Mexico, set up an independent government, applied for admission to the American union, and after years of de- bating and delay, were duly admitted by resolution because it was utterly impossible to swing a two-thirds majority for a regular treaty of annexation. Now it just so happens that there stood in the White House, on a certain historic day, early in 1846, three men, one of whom was the President of the United States. Texas had not then been annexed completely enough to prevent Mexico from trying to take her lost province back, and Zachary Taylor was down on the Rio Grande border insisting that the Rio Grande was the southern boundary of our annexed Texas, while the Mexicans were insisting that the province they had known as Texas only came to the river Nueces, much farther north.0 With the President of the United States on this historic morning were two men. One was a "Mormon" elder, and the other was Sam Houston, famous now and well remembered in the name of Fort Sam Houston, called Houston for short. Houston wanted Texas — all the way to the Rio Grande. The "Mormon" elder wanted Texas all the way to the Rio Grande. Here oln 1916 the writer, while a newspaper correspondent attached to an American army sent south on account of Mexican outbreaks, was escorted to a "private grave- yard of the Texas rangers." It was near a ranch house that had just been burned down, in a raid. The rangers informed me that the Mexicans making this raid had banded together to drive Americans back to the old Texas boundary at the Nueces river; and who died with a flag at their head declaring for such a drive. They had raided the American outpost towns of Ojo de Agua, Mission, Farr, McAllen and Sam Fordyce, in the Rio Grande Valley. Later I talked with many Mexicans who still chafed under the Amerjcsn rule construing Texas' southern border at the Rio Grande..

1156 IMPROVEMENT ERA were two men pulling together — so far but no farther, for as to the rest of the story they were far, far apart. Houston wanted Texas, not to be the great state she has become. The "Mormon" elder wanted Texas just for that. Houston wanted Texas, — and in this he wanted it in common with all of his associates in the taking of Texas — so that this giant state could be cut up into- six small American states as soon as possible. There was a calamity in Congress, at the time, from the pro- Slave standpoint. "Crafty" New Englanders had slipped a clause into the acceptance order for the Northwest territory which declared the states to be carved from that territory should be forever free. Thus Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois were budding out to be constitutionally free states. What would become of the South's congressional majority if the North kept expanding? The North even had gained a state off Massa- chusetts through the creating of Maine. Southerners saw in that only a political stroke aimed at Southern domination of Congress. b And now Houston stood before President Polk to plead — for a Mexican war, and a drive clear through to the West Coast for Slave Territory. The "Mormon" elder was there, too, to plead for a drive clear through to the West Coast. He was there to plead, without a thought of slavery, but with a heart concentrated on American expansion and a belief that the Constitution of the United States was an inspired docu- ment and that the destiny of the American nation was in the keeping of God, who had revealed to Joseph Smith that this destiny was to be a magnificent one at the head and front of world affairs. This "Mormon" elder who met with President Polk and Sam Houston at the White House was Jesse C. Little. The meeting was just before the declaration of war against Mexico and the call for the Mormon Battalion to be a part of the United States Army of the West. Elder Little besought the President to let the "Mormon" people carry American progress on to Oregon. The "Mormons" then being exiles from Nauvoo he sought government sanction for their Western journey and government tasks, such as freighting and fort building.6' The meeting of the three broke up and each went on his way to enormous destinies: Polk to make good that slogan of taking Oregon on which he had been elected, to bring Texas into the Union with America's own decision as to the boundary line, and to press on with the Army of the West to California; Houston to build up the American government in his beloved Texas, and Elder Little to the camp of the exiled "Mormons" at Council Bluffs, bearing the news that a "Mormon" Battalion would surely be called for the Mexican war. It had been started on receipt of news of forced fighting that had ^Senator Benton's Thirty Year View gives a clear picture of these early pro- slave and abolitionist debates. cTullidge's History of Salt Lake City, briefs the report of Elder Little on this first, and on subsequent conferences with the President.

JOSEPH SMITH— AND TEXAS 1157 arrived at the White House at the moment of this interview between the President, Sam Houston, and Elder Little, so that it had thrown the White House personnel into a flurry of excitement during this historic interview. With the Mormon Battalion and the Far West we have no more to do until a subsequent article in this series. Except that this may be a timely point to suggest a curious clause in the order calling for this battalion. The orders to General Kearny required that he take two non- "Mormons" for every "Mormon" he recruited. Why? Polk was solidly Southern. They were not taking any chances on landing a Free State majority in California if they could help it. And who did Kearny turn to for those two non- "Mormons" for every "Mormon?" All who know the story of the "Mormon" expul- sion from Missouri know how prominent a role Col. Price and Col. Doniphan played in that expulsion work of 1838. Well, it was to Col. Price, "Mormon" -hater de luxe, and Col. Doniphan, fair to the "Mormons" but solid pro-Slave leader, that General Kearny turned for the two-to-one complement. In carrying out that famous two-to-one order also, General Kearny allowed both Col. Doniphan and Col. Price to command their own units. The "Mormon" unit was to have no such privilege. For it, General Kearny would provide a com- mander of his own choosing, which, of course, he did— three different commanders before they finally became his whole Army of the West and alone, except for his personal body-guard of dragoons, backed him up in his initial work in setting up a California government. d How Missouri mobocrat, and exiled "Mormon" met as joint soldiers of Uncle Sam in Santa Fe — and the "Mormons" had to press on to California alone, because the Missourians would not obey an order to furnish the "Mormons" a dragoon escort, will form a future chapter, echoing in Mexican warfare the "Mormon" expulsion from Missouri. For the present we must follow on back to Texas with Sam Houston. Houston knew the "Mormons," for in his early work for Texas he had encountered a hatred in New England as fierce as the Missourian hatred for the "Mormons." He had been thwarted through many years. But one American leader had spoken for him, and stood for his cause. This American man of public vision was Joseph Smith. He wanted Texas in the Union and so stated in his canvass for the Presi- dency. He wanted Texas in the Union and offered to lead the "Mor- mons" down there to bring it in, in lieu of leading them to Oregon to bring that country in. Oregon and Texas he saw as equally desirable, just as they have proved to be.* ^William E. Connolley, historian of Kansas, has given a wonderful view of a unit that was to have joined the Mormon Battalion on the California march in his splendid and very humanly written book, The Doniphan Expedition. eSee Joseph Smith's diary as printed by the Church for the years from 183 2 to bis death. '

1158 IMPROVEMENT ERA In this attitude Joseph Smith, however, differed from every other believer in the cause of taking Texas. The west were pro-slave believ- ers. New England, which Joseph Smith had left behind him, hated the thought of bringing in Texas, and fought it to the last ditch of political warfare. New England had been dominant. She hated her power to slip. With her Mayflower traditions, her poets, her culture, she was very willing to admit that she had a superior brand of Amer- ican civilization/ In going west and absorbing the spirit of Ohio, of Missouri, of Illinois, Joseph Smith became one of the first all-around Americans. He was the first to see American expansion as a Nation-building, not a slave-building, cause. "Yes — take Texas — " thus he left New England traditions be- hind. "Yes, take Oregon. Let me lead the Nauvoo Legion there and settle things with the British." Thus he struck out in the vision of the Great America, free of Colonial concepts and stretching to the shores of both Atlantic and Pacific. But the Southerners wanted Texas as their first blow in a series at New England. They worked for twenty years to get Texas, and in the first ten of those twenty years developed that hatred for New England, because of her constant and successful opposition, which made the mere sight of a New Englander intolerable to them when the "Mormons" came to the South's much coveted Missouri to make their homes. In a previous installment we told of the slave-breeding situation in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, that threatened to break the price for slaves by 1824, so that new slave territory had to be sought, to keep the market up. Also to furnish Congressmen to keep New Eng- land predominance down. Treating them as a spiritual prelude to the bloody assaults on the "Mormon" people at Haun's Mill and at Independence, Mo., let us glimpse some of the debates in which leaders of Southern policy took part while the question of Texas simmered in the pot out of which was finally brewed the great, and "Mormon" -predicted, Civil War. William Jay is our first witness. William Jay was an ardent abolitionist, and from Boston he surveyed the Texas situation in a gloomy forecasting of our Civil War, published in 1849. His book is called A Review of the Mexican War. He thus starts the Texasf story off: "In 1820, the state of Missouri, formed out of the Louisiana territory, /More picturesque language than I have elsewhere seen assembled on one page is devoted to dressing down New England for her airs of conscious superiority through this period. The words are Theodore Roosevelt's in a little book he wrote while playing cowboy out in the Dakotahs. It was his first literary effort following his graduation from Harvard. The book was a biography of Senator Benton for the "American Statesmen Series." He wrote it while snowed in during a hard Dakota winter.

JOSEPH SMITH — AND TEXAS 1159 was admitted to the Union as a slave state. To facilitate its admission, and overcome the formidable opposition of the Northern states, to the incorpora- tion into the Confederacy of another slaveholding state, the slaveholders pro- posed and effected the celebrated Missouri Compromise, a law declaring that slavery should in future be prohibted north of 36° 30" north latitude. "It was not long, however, until it was discovered that this Missouri Compromise had reduced within comparatively narrow limits the area from which slave states might hereafter be formed; with the exception of Florida the territory south of the Missouri compromise line was not probably suf- ficient for more than two states. Various expedients were from time to time devised to obtain possession of coveted territory. "A man named James Long, with about seventy-five lawless adventur- ers, left Natchez, on the 17th of June, 1819, and proceeded to Nacogdoches, about 40 miles within the limits of Texas. On the 23d of the same month, he there issued a proclamation which may be regarded the first step in the career of fraud, falsehood, and violence which ultimately led to the annexa- tion of Texas and the war against Mexico." This is a fair sample of the New England mood towards the South when Joseph Smith entered the Missouri country. It is well known that Senator Benton of Missouri interfered with President Polk's first decision to call one thousand "Mormons," and that he proposed that two-to-one plan to assure a large pro-slave majority in any country the army might be discharged in. And here we have Senator Benton again down in this Texas situation in its earliest stages. He was a pioneer advocate of slave-state expansion. For, in 1829, Senator Benton wrote for the St. Louis Beacon a series of essays advocating the purchase of Texas from the Rio Grande to the Arkansas. Senator Benton signed these essays Americanus. In them he picked a quarrel with the treaty that had left Texas out of the Louisiana pur- chase, and spoke of Texas now presenting "a non-slaveholding empire (Mexico had forbidden slavery in 1824), in juxta-position with the slaveholding Southwest." Senator Benton blamed New England oppo- sition to the South and West for the situation, and pointed out that "five or six more slave holding states could be carved out of Texas."\ Indeed, he estimated, "nine more states as large as Kentucky may be formed within the limits of that province. "e And Senator Benton was only one of many who freely spoke their minds at that early date. Later they embargoed all talk about expansion for slavery interests directly. They saw the on-coming storm clouds from the north over such a policy. But in 1829 a Charleston newspaper stated that if President Jackson should bring Texas into the Union "it would exercise an important and favorable influence upon the future destinies of the South, by increasing the votes of the slaveholding states in the United States Senate." gSenator Benton himself became more circumspect later for he omits all refer- ence to his activities on behalf of Texas from his own autobiography. The record is here gleaned from the newspapers of the period and the Congressional <3lobe\ Senator Benton was a tragic figure in his later life for he dearly loved the institu- tion of slavery, but loved another thing still more. This was the Union. His life was shattered as he saw slavery leading to secession.

1160 IMPROVEMENT ERA Judge Upsher of Virginia (afterwards Secretary of State under Tyler, when Joseph Smith presented his first petition to be allowed to go and take Oregon) remarked in the Virginia Convention: "If Texas should be obtained, it would raise the price of slaves, and would be a great advantage to the slaveholders of Virginia." In the Virginia legislature, in 1832, Mr. Doddridge made a speech in favor of taking Texas. He blurted out as his reason for wanting Texas: "It will raise the price of slaves 50 per cent at least." At this time there was a million dollar offer out for Texas, and President Jackson raised it to $5,000,000, on August 25, 1829. Mexico might have sold — but there was a strong anti-slavery feeling in the Mexican government and they would not consent to a treaty providing for the return of fugitive slaves. That led to further de- mands for conquest, as a means of obtaining possession. Every Southern legislature, and Congress itself, gives us an ample record of this Southern desire for an expanding slave market. No one can scan this record without becoming convinced that Joseph Smith became the first contact point where the Civil War spirit rose against Northern people to a white-hot, murderous stage. A revolt was staged in Texas, in March, 1836, during which fifty-seven men signed a Declaration of Independence. William Jay, our abolitionist dissector of the Texas situation, counted noses of the fifty-seven and found fifty were emigrants from the slave states! A United States Army detachment lost 200 deserters but its com- mander, General Gaines, forgave them all when he found them enlisted in the Texan service. A regular fever for enlisting "against Mexico for Texas" ran through the slave-holding states. North Carolina pa- pers advertised for volunteers "to go with J. P. Henderson to Texas in October next." General Dunlap of Tennessee recruited 300 men, and in Kentucky a like number was recruited. The Mexican minister protested quite in vain, for General Gaines finally transmitted to President Jackson the news of the Texan victory over Santa Anna and added these words of cheer: "The victory at San Jacinto means a magnificent acquisi- tion to our Union." It was won in part, by his "deserters" in the Texas service. Now if the Southern statesmen wanted Texas to carve pro-slave states out of it, why not — all the territory to the Pacific? That was a natural expansion of the thought, and how naturally it worked out was noted by a famous New England statesman, John Quincy Adams. For just as the "Mormons" were being expelled from Missouri, he made a speech in Congress on the Texas question. And to it, when printed he appended this note: "From the day of the Battle of San Jacinto, every movement of the administration of this Union appears to have been made for the express pur- pose of breaking off negotiations, and precipitating a war, or of frightening Mexico into the secession not only of Texas but of the whole course of the

JOSEPH SMITH— AND TEXAS 1161 Rio del Norte, and five degrees of latitude across their continent to the South Sea." From the moment of the Battle of San Jacinto the Washington government took a leaf from British diplomacy and began to pile up bills of grievance against Mexico. William Jay of Boston would be surprised at the truth as we know it today, but England, in spite of all his sturdy denials, was actually piling up bills against Mexico at the very moment Washington went into the same game. And these bills were being pressed in Mexico City with the argument that Mexico was Catholic, the Irish were Catholics, therefore Mexico had better pay these bills with Texas and California, and let the British settle them with Irish colonists, who would preserve their religious traditions unchanged. Our own Peter Skene Ogden did a great deal of the fake-claim- with-an-offer-to-settle work, up in Alaska, and he won for the British the strip of seashore that gave England her first sure foothold on Pa- cific waters above Puget Sound.'1 Sir George Simpson bellowed and roared in rage against America as he urged Mexico to adopt a pro- British policy in California, "lest California follow the course of Texas," after he found himself too late in Texas. His own diary re- veals this policy in full. It is printed in his remarkable volume, A Journey 'Round the World. Men like Joseph Smith accepted the truth of the rumors of British aggression, when New Englanders called them "Southern lies," and he stood for a policy of American expansion before England should cut off the way. But with a pro-slave president and a pro-slave cabinet, it was not yet time for American expansion policies to be divorced from slavery-extension policies. The independence of Texas was acknowl- edged March 1, 183 7, and the date about carving slave states out of Texas and the country west to the Pacific, went right on for another eight years before it finally merged into the Mexican War. Northern states took a decided hand, for Vermont, Maine, Massa- chusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Pennsylvania all protested against annexation. It is surprising, in view of this back- ground, that Joseph Smith cut 30 far away from the environment whence he sprang, as to voice the need for a general American growth to the Rio Grande as well as to Puget Sound. Here are bits of comment that give the mood of the hour. In the House of Representatives on April 14, 1842, Mr. Wise of Virginia, who was House leader for the Majority, declared: "Let Texas once raise the flag of foreign conquest, let her once pro- hSee The Conquest of the Great Northwest, by Agnes Laut, and the diaries of Peter Skene Ogden, in the publications of the Oregon Historical Society. The writer's Hidden Heroes of the Rockies gives Ogden's view on claims he can present against the estate of Old Pierre, an Indian in his service, and Sir George Simpson's views as to claims he may prosecute to unhorse Captain Sutter, at Sutter's Fort.

1162 IMPROVEMENT ERA claim a crusade against the rich states to the south of her, and in a moment volunteers would flock to her standard in crowds. They would * * * push her victorious arms to the very shores of the Pacific. "And would not this extend slavery? Yes, the result would be, that, before another quarter of a century, the extension of slavery would not stop short of the Western Ocean. "Give me five million dollars and I would undertake to do it myself. I would place California where all the powers of Great Britain would not be able to reach it. Slavery should pour itself abroad without restraint, and find no limit but the Southern ocean." When Mr. Wise made this remarkable speech he was chairman of the Naval Affairs committee! Hardly less indicative of the maturing spirit of Virginia, mother of Missouri, was a report, by Secretary of the Navy Upshur, to the President on December 4, 1841. This was the same Mr. Upshur who in 1829 wanted Texas "to increase the price of slaves." Now he wished the Naval power of the United States to be used for the protection of American settlements in Cal- ifornia of which he reported there were a considerable number. He dispatched Commodore Jones, also a Virginian, to California imme- diately after making this recommendation. The Commodore was in- structed to inspect all bays and inlets in the Gulf of California and to "correctly lay down their positions!" Here was a provocative measure looking directly ahead to war. General Lamar relinquished his post as president of Texas to con- duct a propaganda in the States in favor of immediate annexation, "be- cause the anti-slavery party in Texas may acquire the ascendency and may not only abolish slavery by a constitutional vote, but may change the whole character of the constitution itself." He appealed to the Southern states to work for annexation be- cause "annexation would give stability and safety to the peculiar do- mestic institutions of the South and thereby save them forever from the unparalleled calamities of abolition." Fuel for the fires of the Civil War was here being laid down, for John Quincy Adams again rose in the North. He published an ad- dress to the people of the United States signed by himself and twelve other members of Congress. It was dated March, 1843, and boldly called on the free States to avert the calamity of an annexed Texas, "Which would not only inevitably result in the dissolution of the Union, but would fully justify it." When President Tyler came in he promoted Mr. Upshur to be Secretary of State, and in this capacity he declared in an official com- munication to an agent in Texas, that "few calamities could befall this country more to be deplored than the establishment of a predom- inant British influence and the abolition of domestic slavery in Texas." "Say nothing more about slavery," this agent wrote back, "talk about civil and political and religious liberty." The time had come to put the slavery issue under cover. In another four years Joseph Smith and James K. Polk were destined both to be in the public eye as men mentioned for the Presi-

JOSEPH SMITH— AND TEXAS 1163 dency. Polk was to run on an issue of "Fifty-four Forty or Fight," and Joseph Smith planned to run on an issue of "Take Oregon and Texas," the same issue without its slogan. Polk was to come into public life with a solid pro-slave backing, while Joseph Smith was to lead a cause of National expansion from a New England background and a religious declaration that America's destiny was under inspired guidance, and was going to be brilliantly magnificent, — not colonially hidebound and New Englandish in flavor. How the issues there joined led to the rush to the Great West with the men Joseph Smith trained in the Nauvoo Legion as the armed fringe of the migrating movement will be discussed in the next paper in this series. Where You Belong There are days so wearisome and grey, Without a sunny minute, A sky that weeps the live-long day Without a rift within it, A day so dun and blue and long, No mortal soul could love it — It's there, right there, that you belong, With lilt of cheer and burst of song, For you can plan above it. There are homes where everything goes wrong, With scarce a kind word spoken, With discord twanging all day long, And fond ties strained and broken; And hearths that idols' wreckage strew With no one to restore them, Perhaps a household looks to you, To mend the sundered ties anew, For you can vision for them. There are plans that take the nights to dream, And years of toil to win them, Dear cherished hope and petted scheme, With life itself within them. And some hearts break that wait too long The hour of compensation; To restitute where things go wrong — In someone's vision you belong — To give it consummation! Mesa, Arizona BERTHA A. K.LEINMAN