Mormons and Presidents: Fillmore - Buchanan

After a protracted absence I consent to continue the Mormons and the President’s series.

#13 Millard Fillmore (1850-1853)

I have long regarded the extent to which the Latter-day Saints yoked themselves to the political fortunes of this now comicly unimportant president, with some degree of amusement. Fillmore was the chief executive who made Utah a territory and took the political risk of appointing Brigham Young its first Governor, though this latter decision was made in part because no one else really wanted the job, and politically influential Mormon allie Thomas L. Kane had vouched safe for Young’s moral character. In appreciation it was decreed that the new territorial capital would be named Fillmore and situated in a county to be called Millard. This was part of an ultimately short lived effort to situate the capital in a location more central to the geography of the state then Salt Lake. A surprisingly ambitious capital building was begun in Fillmore but ultimately scaled back and turned over to other civic uses, it still stands today, and the town remains the county seat for Millard.

Though comical the political alliance between Fillmore and the Mormons is in many ways logical. The future president grew up in Monrovia situated in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, not fifty miles from the Smith family farm just outside Palmyra. It was remarked by at least one newspaper (1) that Smith and Fillmore were of similar political dispositions. Fillmore may have also seen the Mormons as potential allies against two groups with whom he felt at political and cultural odds, the Masons and the Catholics. Ultimately Fillmore failed to gain his own parties nomination for President in 1852, though he later ran under the third party banner of the ‘American Party’, popularly known as “Know Nothings”. Fillmore of course only became president because of the unexpected death of Zachary Taylor, he had been chosen as vice president as a ticket balancer, though he the General would come to clash politically during his short tenure in the number two spot. Fillmore continues to be looked on favorably by the Latter-day Saint community to this day.

# 14 Franklin Pierce (1853-1857)

The lest written about American president doesn’t provide me with much material to write about in regards to his relationship with the Mormons. According to Winder’s book the only issue of note to transpire between the president and the Church during Pierce’s signal term was the matter of Brigham Young’s retention in the office of Governor. Pierce originally sought to replace Young with a Colonel Edward J. Steptoe, who he covertly sent to Utah for that purpose. But upon his arrival Steptoe was so impressed with Young’s handling of the office, and the degree of loyalty by which he was all but universally regarded in the populace, that the Colonel joined the territories few other “gentile” government appointees in lobbying for Young’s retention in the office. There were one or two other not very serious scares that political pressure would force Pierce to remove Brigham Young from the governorship, but they of course came to not. Apostle and future Church president John Taylor meet with President Pierce in Washington shortly before he left office in 1857.

#15 James Buchanan (1857-1861)

Although also obscure by today’s standards, James Buchanan is as derided by the Mormons as Millard Fillmore is respected. Although he defeated John C. Freemont, the first candidate of the adamantly anti-polygamy Republican party (2), in the election of 1856, events early in Buchanan’s administration would turn the tide of Mormon opinion against him.

Some federal appointees to the Utah territory, feeling slighted and that there power in the ‘theocratic’ territory was purely cosmetic, left their posts for the east and spread allegations that Brigham Young was raising an army with which he intended to form an independent kingdom. This apparently authoritive validation of a fear many in America had held in regards to the Mormons since their settlement in Utah, roused President Buchanan to send the largest peace time military force in American history to oust Young from office, place former Augusta Mayor Alfred Cumming in that position, and secure the territory by force if necessary.

Word of this expeditionary force under the command of General Albert Sidney Johnston (3), reached Brigham Young as he was conducting a commemorative celebration of the Mormons arriving in the valley exactly ten years earlier. Martial law was quickly declared, missionaries called home from over seas, and massive plans for both evacuations and armed resistance made. With the Mormon collective experience of persecution and expulsion from Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, a siege mentality prevailed, one only exacerbated by the militant religious revival known as ‘the Mormon Reformation’ begun by First Presidency member Jedediah M. Grant the year before. While Mormon gorilla tactics employed in delaying Johnston’s Army through the winter, combined with diplomatic negations allowed for the crises (alternately named the “Utah” and the “Mormon” War) to end peacefully with Cummings (4) installation as governor, it did not alas prevent the occurrence of the notorious 'Mountain Meadow Massacre' in southern Utah late that summer.

The relationship between Buchanan and the Saints would never be repaired, even his vicarious rite of proxy baptism would be delayed for a great many years after his death. Indeed the whole episode of “Buchanan’s Blunder” would set the tone of Mormon relations with the U.S. government for decades to come. Interestingly Buchanan claimed to see the issue not as a religious one, but rather solely confined to the alleged seditions of the Utah people (who he later “pardoned”). Said the president:

“With the religious opinions of the Mormons, as long as they remained mere opinions, however deplorable in themselves and revolting to the moral and religious sentiments of all Christendom, I had no right to interfere.” (5) So obviously Buchanan did have some religious issues with the Saints, but what establishment American didn’t at that time? (6)

President Brigham Young‘s opinion of President Buchanan would lower over the course of the next four years, I quote three examples of the Church leaders statements on the man over that period, each found and cited between pages 96 and 101 of Winders book.:

1857, during the crises:

“James Buchanan… is naturally a passive, docile, benevolent, and good man- that is his disposition, I will venture. <> The President hearkens to the clamor around him; and, as did Pontius Pilate, in the case of Jesus Christ, has washed his hands, saying, ‘I am clear of the blood of those Latter-day Saints.’”

Around 1858, after the ‘pardon':

“… I thank President Buchanan for forgiving me, but I really cannot tell what I’ve done.”

Mocking Buchanan while he served as a lame duck president, just weeks before Lincolns inauguration in 1861:

“The administration of King James Buchanan, what an administration! What is the difficulty with King James? His high position and exalted opinion of himself so addled and bewildered him, that he said, ’I am the greatest man in the nation! I am the Chief Magistrate!!”

So in conclusion, Mormons don’t like James Buchanan very much, but honestly neither does anybody else. (7)

1. Erie Observer (Erie, PA), 23 March 1844. Cited page 86 of Presidents and Prophets.

2. The Republican Party was founded in Wisconsin in 1854 with a platform that called for the obliteration of the “twin relics of barbarism” polygamy and slavery.

3. Johnston, later a Confederate General, was killed in the battle of Shiloh in 1862.

4. Cumming would actually prove to be a popular and fair Governor, he would leave office in 1861 to return to Georgia at the start of the Civil War.

5. Buchanan, The Works of James Buchanan, 10:152. Cited in Winder page 102.

6. Thomas L. Kane, who was part of the negotiating team that ended the crises.

7. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_United_States_Presidents