What Hath God Wrought (106 page)

After five months of debate, Congress enacted the notice of termination on April 23, 1846, with an important amendment secured by the moderates encouraging an “amicable settlement” of the Oregon Question.
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In response, on May 19 the British proposed the 49th parallel with a detour to save them the southern tip of Vancouver Island (where, of course, the Hudson’s Bay Company had built Fort Victoria). They yielded all the rest of the disputed triangle, although it contained not two dozen Americans at the time.
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The proposal represented all Polk could reasonably hope for. Cleverly, he referred it to the Senate for “advice and consent”
before
signing a treaty rather than (as presidents customarily do) afterwards. War with Mexico having already begun by this time, most senators felt only too eager to settle the dispute with Britain, and they promptly voted 38 to 12 for acceptance. Polk immediately drew up a partition treaty in accordance with the British proposal, got it ratified, and sent it off to London on June 18. In doing so, the president could claim that he had deferred to the Senate’s wishes, not broken a campaign pledge. Northern Democrats who would have held rallies to protest against the compromise received orders from party headquarters to desist. The administration’s relief at having the Oregon Question satisfactorily resolved was expressed candidly if bluntly by the Democratic
New York Herald
: “We can now thrash Mexico into decency at our leisure.”
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The resolution of the Oregon Question stands as a monument to peaceful diplomacy. Each country received about half of the whole Oregon territory. The outcome also represented a masterpiece of domestic politics. The president had seemingly bluffed his way past both the British and the American political establishments. And just in the nick of time: Ten days after the British sent off the partition proposal that the Senate accepted, word reached London that hostilities had broken out along the Rio Grande between Mexico and the United States. If they had known the United States had involved itself in a war, the British might have tried to drive a harder bargain.

What kind of credit for the favorable settlement of the Oregon boundary should go to Polk may be questioned. His defenders, in his own time and since, have praised his firmness and quoted his words to a member of Congress: “The only way to treat John Bull was to look him straight in the eye.”
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But it seems likely that the British responded more to the presence of the American settlers, the decline of the Oregon fur trade, and their eagerness for American imports of cotton and grain than to the president’s eyeballing.
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Once the Hudson’s Bay Company had decided to relocate to Vancouver Island, the die was cast, and Sir George Simpson made his decision to move before Polk even took office. The British foreign secretary would likely have settled for the boundary agreed in 1846 as early as December 1843 if the Tyler administration had followed through on Edward Everett’s suggestion. Democratic rhetorical posturing on behalf of 54° 40' in fact aimed more at a domestic American audience than at a British one.
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Indeed, a demonstration of firmness by the British prompted Polk and his cabinet to back away from extreme demands and (secretly) invite a compromise. On February 3, 1846, McLane sent a dispatch from London that thirty warships of the Royal Navy had set sail for North American waters. Secretary of State James Buchanan received it on Saturday night, February 21, and immediately alerted the president. For several days (including Sunday) Polk and his cabinet considered what response to make. They decided not to recommend “war-like preparations” to Congress and instead instructed McLane on February 26 to assure the British that Polk would entertain a 49th parallel compromise proposal and refer it to the Senate for advice before responding. Apprised of this decision, Pakenham sent a message to his government the same day stating that the flotilla had served its purpose and further preparations for war would be unnecessary. All this while the president continued to entertain visits from hawkish congressmen warning him that any retreat from 54° 40' would bring Democratic defeat at the polls.
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If Polk is to receive a measure of credit for the peaceful resolution of the Oregon Question, it should not be for firmness but for sending a conciliatory message on February 26, 1846, instead of escalating the crisis.

Many politicians besides Polk tried to exploit the nationalistic passions of the public for political advantage in these years—among them Secretary of State Buchanan. The Pennsylvania Democrat had spoken out strongly in Congress for the whole of Oregon. Inside Polk’s cabinet, however, he consistently urged compromise. Then, with the settlement finally reached, Buchanan strove to dissociate himself from it, so as to preserve his credibility with the 54° 40' extremists. “It is a great misfortune that a member of the cabinet should be an aspirant for the Presidency,” Polk grumbled, “because I cannot rely upon his honest and disinterested advice.” A month later the president complained that too many Democratic Senators showed less concern about “54-40” or “49” than about “48” (the coming presidential election). Considering how carefully Polk himself calculated political advantage, his witticism displayed unconscious irony.
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A curious red herring complicated the Oregon negotiations: whether the British should retain navigation rights on the Columbia River. Eventually, the United States granted a limited right, but the British never exercised it. The Columbia River (as insiders realized at the time), with its many rapids and a sandbar across its mouth, was actually not easily navigable to oceangoing vessels, though canoes used it. What mattered to navigation and Pacific commerce were Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which the disputants ended up sharing. The real importance of the Columbia River, as only the future would reveal, lay in its capacity to generate electric power.

In November 1847, Narcissa and Marcus Whitman were martyred and their mission in eastern Oregon destroyed by members of the Cayuse tribe who resented the whites having introduced measles along with Christianity.
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The remaining missionaries shifted their attention from the Native Americans to civilizing the rowdy white Oregonians.

IV

Joseph Smith, prophet of God escaped from a Missouri jail, crossed the Mississippi River to Illinois, where on April 22, 1839, he rejoined his family and some five thousand other recently arrived Latter-day Saints. The good people of Quincy granted a temporary haven to these refugees from religious persecution. Within a few weeks Smith had identified the site for a new stake of Zion on the left bank of the Mississippi, a hamlet called Commerce that he renamed Nauvoo, a word that he (correctly) informed his people meant “a beautiful place” in Hebrew.
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There the faithful gathered, reinforced now by converts arriving from England via New Orleans. They drained the swampland and commenced to implement their prophet’s vision of a grand city centered on a new temple. The Illinois state legislature, happy to receive an influx of hardworking migrants, granted a municipal charter allowing Nauvoo virtually complete self-rule. In practice this meant the rule of Joseph Smith: mayor of the town, commander of its militia, city planner, recorder of deeds, and chief justice of the municipal court. Unlike most frontier towns, Nauvoo aspired to economic self-sufficiency, but this was not easily achieved, particularly with a shortage of investment capital.
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As a utopian community it impressed visitors; James Gordon Bennett’s
New York Herald
called Nauvoo “a new religious civilization” based on “industry and energy,” adding that it “may revolutionize the whole earth one of these days.”
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The Mormons dug up the press they had hidden and lugged it all the way from western Missouri to set it up again for a newspaper of their own: the
Times and Seasons
. For several years, Nauvoo grew even faster than Chicago and achieved a population of ten thousand by the end of 1842, making it probably the largest city in Illinois and the approximate equal of old St. Louis.
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Both political parties courted the Mormons in Illinois. Most U.S. male converts to the faith came from small farmer and small-town artisan backgrounds, and normally voted Democratic. In Kirtland, the Saints had voted solidly as soft-money Democrats although their part of Ohio was otherwise strongly Whig. In Missouri, however, the Democratic governor Lilburn Boggs had persecuted them and called for their “extermination.” When Smith led a delegation to Washington to ask for federal protection, Henry Clay supported them in the Senate, but President Van Buren reminded them of state rights and responded bluntly, “Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you.”
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Accordingly, the Mormons cast their votes in 1840 for the Whig presidential electors. As a gesture toward an Illinois Democrat who had befriended them, they scratched out the last name on the Whig list of electors and wrote in that of their friend; the name they deleted: Abraham Lincoln. In spite of this, Lincoln ranked among the Illinois politicians most sympathetic to the Mormons.
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Democratic politicians did not give up on the Mormons, however, and when Missouri agents came to arrest Joseph Smith as a fugitive from justice, Stephen Douglas, acting in his capacity as an Illinois state judge, set the prophet free. The grateful Mormons returned to the Democratic fold in 1842. In predominantly Democratic Illinois, it seemed a safer bet. The switch infuriated the Whigs, and did not restore the Mormons’ popularity with their Democratic neighbors in the nearby towns of Warsaw and Carthage. Americans were accustomed to bloc voting by ethnoreligious groups, but not to bloc voting that could go either way as directed. In May 1842 occurred an attempt on the life of Missouri’s Governor Boggs, and people suspected Smith of ordering or prophesying the assassination. Illinois refused to extradite him to Missouri, but fear increased of the Saints’ growing numbers and their prophet’s temporal power. The gentile public once again gradually soured on the Mormons.

Early in 1844, Joseph Smith decided to run for president of the United States. If the abolitionists could field a candidate, why not the Mormons? The campaign seems to have had a place in the prophet’s vision of an earthly Kingdom of God that would precede and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. If it failed, emigration might be necessary to establish the Kingdom.
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Such millennial expectations did not preclude policies sensible in secular terms. Smith’s program included abolition of imprisonment for debt, the reestablishment of a national bank, federal protection for civil liberties abridged by states and mobs, the acquisition of not only Texas and Oregon but all of Mexico and Canada—provided the inhabitants peacefully consented—and encouragement for states to enact emancipation by providing masters compensation from federal land revenues.
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Whatever his program’s merits, Smith’s campaign persuaded many gentiles that the prophet had fallen into megalomania.

Joseph Smith did not live to participate in the election. The chain of events leading up to his death began when an influential group of dissident Mormons set up a newspaper of their own, the
Nauvoo Expositor
. On June 7, 1844, the
Expositor
published its only issue. The paper accused the prophet and a few of his intimates of practicing plural marriage and teaching the existence of a plurality of gods. Both charges were essentially true and later avowed, but Smith did not yet feel ready for this. He would probably have been better advised to acknowledge the doctrines publicly and proceed immediately with the migration westward that he and his inner circle had already begun considering. Instead he had the Nauvoo city council, which he dominated, declare the new paper a “public nuisance” and destroy its press.
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In 1837, Elijah Lovejoy had died defending his press at Alton; Illinois public opinion now regretted that episode and had resolved nothing like it would happen again. In an age of communications revolution, the Mormon assault on freedom of the press aroused unanimous condemnation from the press. Where Joseph
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and his followers had won sympathy as victims of religious persecution, they now seemed its perpetrators. Convinced that Smith had exceeded his legal authority and become a dangerous despot, the militias assembled in Warsaw and Carthage, the centers of anti-Mormon sentiment. The militias announced their intention to restore law and order in Nauvoo by force, which, of course, exceeded their own authority. In response, Smith mobilized the Nauvoo Legion. Illinois governor Thomas Ford hastened to the scene to forestall a civil war.

Ford hoped to restore law and order through mediation rather than force. Joseph agreed to disband the Legion to avoid bloodshed. The governor demanded he also submit to arrest for the unwarranted destruction of the
Expositor
. Convinced that he faced lynching if taken into custody, Joseph’s first impulse was to flee. A day later his sense of mission and loyalty to his followers overcame his instinct of self-preservation, and he returned to face arrest and transportation to Carthage. The governor foolishly left him there guarded by the Carthage militia and went off to Nauvoo to negotiate disarmament with the Mormons. In Ford’s absence, men of the disbanded Warsaw militia returned as a lynch mob. The Carthage militia, by prearrangement, made a show of defense and fled. The mob found Joseph and his brother Hirum in an unlocked cell and shot them to death on June 27, 1844. The state’s press perfunctorily deplored the murders; the governor managed to secure indictments against some members of the mob, but not to convict them. The Mormons did not fight back.
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