Joseph Smith, and the Great West

JOSEPH SMITH, AND THE GREAT WEST Slavery's Burden on the Pioneers By I. K. Russell, Author of "Hidden Heroes of the Rockies" IV I congratulate you, my fellow citizens, upon the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in the violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality and reputation and the best interests of our country have long been eager to proscribe. — President Thomas Jefferson, to Congress in 1806. Petition also, ye goodly inhabitants of the Slave States, your legislatures to abolish slavery by the year 1850, or now, and save the Abolitionist from reproach and ruin, infamy and shame. Pray Congress to pay every man a reasonable price for his slaves. Break off the shackles from the poor black man, and hire them to work like other human beings; for an hour of virtuous liberty on earth is worth a whole eternity of bondage! — Joseph Smith, in an Address to the American People, Feb. 7, 1844. ' I concluded by assuring them [the Mexicans] that the bare mention of the sub- ject (of the abolition of slavery) in any treaty to which the United States was a party, was an absolute impossibility: that no President of the United States would dare to present any such treaty to the Senate: and that, if it were in their power to offer me the whole territory described in our project, increased ten fold in value, and in ad- dition to that, covered a foot thick with pure gold, upon the single condition that slavery should be excluded therefrom, I would not entertain the offer for a moment, nor think even of communicating it to Washington. — Commissioner Trist, the Presi- dent's agent in negotiating peace terms with Mexico after the Mexican War. Could views be more apart than shown in the three extracts given above? In 1806, President Jefferson expressed the hope that America will expand without slavery. In 1844 Joseph Smith made a direct and urgent appeal to settle the issue. In 1849, five years later, the Mormon Battalion had made its march to the west coast, carrying the armed fringe of America's power with it. A Peace Commissioner has been named. And what is it he says? He reports that if all California was covered with gold a foot deep he would not help bring it into the Union as a free state, in which slave holding would be illegal? If Commissioner Trist's view were isolate and alone we could forget it, but it is far from that. It teems with the same kind of spirit with which the South was full and had been teeming over with from 1820 on. Picture, then, how much of the true story of the Far West we lose if we picture it as an unknown, unwanted, uncountenanced land until the Pioneer bands pushed across the Prairies in 1847 and 1849! We have seen from the debate in Congress on the annexation of Texas how the lust to carve slave states out of the Far West filled the South, even before Missouri had become populated. We have seen how the "Mormons" came into Missouri from New England when that was forbidden land to all save pro-Slave adherents.

62 IMPROVEMENT ERA What shall we now say of the "Mormon" journey to Utah? With the South feeling as Commissioner Trist here states, were the "Mormons" any more welcome in Utah — then a part of California — than they were welcome in Missouri? At the time Joseph Smith appealed to the American people to set- tle the slavery issue by purchase, the newspapers of the South were making front page news of the attractions of California and were urging pro-Slave settlers to rush out to that state. Some of that front page news is now very interesting. For instance that old "joke" about the man who went to California and returned east and died, leaving a will asking that his body be sent back to Cal- ifornia for burial! The joke goes on to explain that after the body was shipped there, the man suddenly came alive again and was still living there in a hale and hearty way. That yarn is usually credited to modern real estate promoters. Yet I have found it in publications printed two years before the "Mormon" pioneers took to the Plains for their mighty Exodus. Those news crusades for pro-Slave settlers for the Far West cov- ered every phase of Far Western geography. The Navajo Indians were discussed and praised for their rugs. The salmon of the Snake river were mentioned as a source of commerce. Utah's streams were praised for their beaver, and Great Salt Lake was described along with the main routes through the Utah country to Oregon and to California. These matters even made up thundering orations in Congress, some of them antedating the known exploration data about Utah. For instance, Congressman Floyd of Virginia, in December, 1824, described the Utah country in a speech to Congress, including Great Salt Lake, which he called Lake Timpanogos. His speech was before the reports of its discovery, in that same winter, by Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith and Etienne Provot and could very easily have reached him in Washington. What shall we say, then, of the "Mormon" Pioneers and their journey to Utah? We must say that they did not make the journey free and clear of issues that harried them in Missouri. We must say that they carried a heavy burden of Slavery issues with them and that these pursued them and hounded their career even until Johnston's Army was sent to blight them and blot out their Free State inclinations and power. One of the strange things about the "Mormon" people to me is the wide extent to which they have always influenced the destiny of the world. In this case we have Joseph Smith teaching the "Mor- mons" to sing their great hymn of migration: In Upper California, O that's the land for me — It lies between the mountains and the great Pacific sea. The Saints can be protected there, and enjoy their liberty In Upper California, O that's the land for me. And at the same time we have the South intent on quite another

JOSEPH SMITH — AND THE GREAT WEST 63 destiny for Upper California, and working hard to bring this destiny into full flower. Yet, as issues crashed along until the great Civil War settled them in bloodshed, Joseph Smith's view of the Far West's destiny is the one we see working out. The other was hurled back upon itself with the violence of thousands of deaths in battle. You can touch affairs at any point this way, and find "Mormon" trails in the midst of their nerve centers. I started to read the life of Gladstone, the great English statesman. One would hardly expect to find Joseph Smith's influence at work there. Yet Gladstone, it turned out, was thoroughly aroused by Joseph Smith's plan to occupy the Far West. Gladstone wanted this same Far West for England, and urged in every way English colonization to beat the "Mormon" col- onization to its destiny. He started work for English land laws, as liberal as American land laws, and an English road up the Saskatchewan as good as the American road up the Platte. He even started a move to extend the Canadian government over Rupert's Land, which then included all Canada west of Ontario, and all Oregon, including Utah to about American Fork canyon — as far south as the beaver streams existed. I started to read a history of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Stafford- shire, in England, and found that a major factor in their careers in the forties was the vast exodus from them, over thousands of "Mormon" converts. A History of Detroit turned up a chapter on the "Mormons" of the Strang colony who landed there after their leader's murder — his colony being an offshoot of the day in which the sturdy "Mormon" pioneers left for the Great West. A History of Omaha reveals Brigham Young's portrait at the second chapter with stories of the horrible hardships of the "Mormon" pioneers at Council Bluffs and in the hard treck through Nebraska. Thus it goes, with the Pioneer move ramifying into the af- fairs of many nations. In this place we now desire to expand further the data already presented about the spirit of the South at the time Joseph Smith's Nauvoo Legion, reorganized and sworn into the Fed- eral Service as the "Mormon Battalion," became the armed fringe of America's move to the western ocean. The cloud of pro-Slave politics hovered over it, a tiny army of free state men by birth and inclination, all the way along its course, as we shall see. It is stated by Brigham H. Roberts, in his Missouri Persecutions, that on July 20, 1833, an interested spectator of mob outbreaks against the "Mormons" in Jackson county was Lilburn W. Boggs, lieutenant-governor. Gov. Boggs walked through the ashes of the burned home of W. W. Phelps, and remarked to some of the plundered Saints, "You know now what our Jackson boys can do, and you must leave the country." And so had Boggs to "leave the country." After he had ex-

64 IMPROVEMENT ERA pelled the "Mormons" from Missouri, in 1838, in a bloodthirsty manner, he could not see them depart from the West in peace. He needs must rush on out to forestall them. In 1846," while General Kearny was still at Fort Leavenworth recruiting his "Army of the West," and receiving the Mormon Battalion as the first to respond, this same Boggs rushed out onto the Plains at the head of a pro-Slave party of California emigrants. They called to Kearny for protection against the "Mormons," over whom they had the heebie-jeebies, as the modern young person would say. Why did they have to rush out that way? Boggs was no mere spectator at the first outbreak of mob violence against the "Mormons" in Missouri. We have shown the pro-slave spirit of that hour, and Boggs was its agent in Missouri affairs, as Houston was its agent in Texan affairs. Now let us glance at some Congressional and other opinions while the Mormon Battalion was on its dreary march across New Mexico, Arizona and the California deserts to San Diego. A bit of a Northern trick threw the monkey-wrench into Con- gressional sessions, which precipitated a rush of revealing pro-slave talk. There was a certain effort at one time to conceal the pro-slave lust for the Far West, to gain senators and members of the House in overwhelming numbers against New England. These sudden outpour- ings were so torrid that we may almost say that the settlement of Utah, the conquest of New Mexico, and the annexation of California, pre- cipitated the Civil War. Both the South and New England were heated to fighting pitch over the prospective disturbance of this new territory on the Congressional balance of power. And orators on both sides flared out about it with predictions of disunion and a war. The monkey-wrench in the gear box of the South's political ma- chine was thrown by a Northern member of the Lower House, Mr. Wilmot. He heard the avowals of President Polk that the Mexican war was not for conquest. He, therefore, quietly introduced a little measure known as the Wilmot proviso. It provided that any territory coming to America as a result of the war should be Free State territory. Otherwise no money was to be appropriated for the conduct of the war. And a pretty hornet's nest this little proviso stirred up. "We trust that our Southern representatives will not forget that this is a Southern war," screamed the Charleston Patriot, editorially. "Every battle fought in Mexico," wrote the editor of the Charleston Courier, "but insures the acquisition of territory which must widen the field of southern enterprise and power for the future. And the final result will be to adjust the whole balance of power in the Nation, so as to give us (of the South) control of the government in all time to come. "The Whigs of the North oppose the war," cried the Federal Union, a Georgia paper, "because its legitimate effect is, as they contend, the extension of southern territory and southern slavery." "The natural tendency of the slaves under our humane policy is to in- crease," explained the Mobile Herald, "and the effect is that, if we have no outlet for them, no soil to put them on, they will be huddled within the

JOSEPH SMITH— AND THE GREAT WEST 65 extreme southern limits of the Union. This evil may be avoided by taking new territory in the direction of Mexico. We need plenty of soil to render slavery profitable." These cries, outside of Congress, were nothing to the storm raised by the Wilmot proviso within. The president wanted $3,000,- 000 to prosecute the war to an early peace. It was proposed to give him the money — for Free State territory only. At once Southern legislatures petitioned Congress, mass meetings petitioned Congress, and slave holders petitioned Congress. Senator Buchanan, representing Pennsylvania, was ardently on the pro-slave side. And this was more than ten years before he sent the pro-slave General Johnston out to hound the "Mormon" settlers of Utah. "All Christendom is leagued against the South on the question of slavery," was the way he put it in 1843, even before this crisis over the financing of President Polk's war. Buchanan was speaking to the matter of the Northwest Boundary treaty with Eng- land, which he opposed on account of its unsatisfactory provisions about the return of fugitive slaves! "The South has no allies to sustain its constitutional rights, except the democracy of the north. In my own state we inscribe on our party banners hostility to abolition. It is one of the cardinal principles of my party." Here we have President Buchanan laying his heart bare, as Boggs did when he told the "Mormons" how "we Jackson boys" can do it. As the storm over the Wilmot proviso broke in Congress, Mr. Dargan, of Alabama, let go with this verbal shot: "Say to the South that they are only fighting to make Free Territory, that it is only for this that the brave men of Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama are periling their lives, and they will demand the settlement of this question now, preliminary to any further prosecution of the war." The men Joseph Smith had trained were periling their lives at the time by the longest march in the history of Infantry, but they had no cry about Free State territory being a worthless quest. The "Mor- mon" Pioneers were on their way to Utah, but no such qualms held them back, or dampened the ardor of their nation-building march. "If the people of the South are to be excluded from the territory their own blood and treasure may win," said Mr. Tibbatts of Ken- tucky, "then I am opposed to carrying on this war on such terms." Mr. Calhoun, who had sneeringly advised Joseph Smith, once, to take the "Mormons" to Oregon, when he appealed for justice on Mis- souri issues, broke forth with this impassioned plea: "I am a Southern man and a slaveholder, a kind and merciful one I trust, I say for one I would rather meet any extremity upon earth than give up one inch of our equality — one inch of what belongs to us as members of this great Republic What! Acknowledge our inferiority! The sur- render of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledged inferiority."

6o :mprovement era Very close to a declaration of war, this. Mr. Bagby of Alabama was even more outspoken: "I would say, away with the Union if no more territory were to be acquired, lest Southern institutions should exist in such territory." And Mr. Magnum of North Carolina: "There are now 3,000,000 of slaves penned up in the slave states, and they are increasing population, increasing faster than the whites. And are the slaves to be always confined to their prison states?" The famous Wilmot proviso was defeated by a vote of 3 1 to 2 1 in the Senate, and by a vote of 221 to 199 in the House. Thus it perished, but it had done its work — it had laid bare the Southern de- mand for the Far West for slavery! Many friends wrote me when I started this series that they feared I was imaginative and was hanging too heavy a series of conclusions on too slender a thread. They could not conceive the heart of the South being really fixed on the Far West, and on Missouri, so that the slavery issue really affected Far Western destiny. What will they say now? For reasons of space I have barely touched the volume of Southern opinion rampant during the Mexican war upon this theme. In the next installment we will take up the work of hunting down Free Staters that went right on in Missouri, with its motive laid bare, as it was not in the case of the "Mormons," for many years after the days of the expulsion. Armistice Hymn Hail! Day of Armistice, hail to the nations Quenching the fire of the thunderous guns; Ended the anguish of war's desolations, Broken the strength of the terrible ones. Hail to the warriors peacefully sleeping, Nameless or known in the cross-covered plains; Bow we with those who sit quietly weeping, Bearing their loss for the world's richer gains. We will be keeping the tryst ye decreed us, Ye who lie under the wave and the sod; Watchful we stand, guarding all that has freed us, Resting our deeds in the judgment of God. Hail, Day of Brotherhood, hail to the morning Of the new day that has scarcely begun, When, o'er the earth in that glorious dawning, Good will shall triumph and all men be one.