Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, a man of certainties, was befuddled. In the late fall of 1843, he had written to five of the likely presidential candidates—Whig Henry Clay and Democrats Lewis Cass, John C. Calhoun, Martin Van Buren, and Richard Mentor Johnson. “What will be your rule of action,” Smith asked, “relative to us, as a people?” The Mormon newspaper, the Times and Seasons, published an editorial at about the same time titled “Who Shall Be Our Next President?”
We as a people have labored, and are still laboring under great injustice from the hand of a neighboring state. The Latter Day Saints have had their property destroyed and their houses made desolate by the hands of the Missourians; murders have been committed with impunity, and many in consequence of oppression, barbarism, and cruelty, have slept the sleep of death. They have been obliged to flee from their possessions into a distant land, in the chilling frost of December; robbed, spoiled, desolate, houseless, and homeless; without any just pretext of shadow of law; without having violated the laws of that state, or of the United States, and have had to wander as exiles in a strange land, without as yet, being able to obtain any redress for their grievances.
The newspaper’s answer to its own question was that the next president should be “the man who will be the most likely to render us assistance in obtaining redress” for those grievances.
If Smith seriously expected the candidates to offer rousing defenses of his persecuted sect, he was sorely disappointed. “I can enter into no engagements, make no promises, give no pledges to any particular portion of the people,” Clay wrote in response, although he had been making such promises to other portions of the people for the better part of three decades. He did note that “it is not inconsistent with this declaration to say, that I have viewed with a lively interest, the progress of the Latter Day Saints; that I have sympathized in their sufferings under injustice, as it appeared to me, which has been inflicted upon them; and that I think, in common with all other religious communities, they ought to enjoy the security and protection of the constitution and the laws.”
Cass, Van Buren, and Johnson didn’t bother to write back. But states’ rights champion Calhoun—the man who would soon claim a political benefit from the destruction aboard the Princeton—did, and his response riled Smith. “The case does not come within the Jurisdiction of the Federal Government, which is one of limited and specific powers,” the South Carolinian wrote.
On January 2, 1844, Smith took pen in hand and responded. “If the General Government has no power, to reinstate expelled citizens to their rights, there is a monstrous hypocrite fed and fostered from the hard earnings of the people!” the prophet wrote indignantly. And he offered a novel (for its time) interpretation of federal authority: “that Congress, with the president as Executor, is as Almighty in its sphere as Jehovah is in his.” His response to Clay was equally caustic, inspiring an anti-Mormon newspaper in Warsaw, just down the river from Nauvoo, to say that “a more scurrilous, low, blackguard production, we have seldom seen.”
Smith was rowing upstream and had to know it. Calhoun and John Quincy Adams agreed on very little, but both were of the same mind on the question of federal assistance to address the Mormon persecution. “The power of Congress to interfere is questionable,” Adams would write after meeting with a delegation of saints. “The right is doubtful.”
JOSEPH SMITH. Library of Congress
Like William Miller, Smith was a seeker, who had founded Mormonism after coming to the conclusion that no other existing religious group met his spiritual needs. Now he reached a similar conclusion about politics. Mormons tended to vote as a bloc, but they shifted their allegiances from Whig to Democrat and back to Whig as circumstances dictated. If no presidential candidate would address the concerns of the Latter-Day Saints, Smith would have to run for president himself. And so on January 29, one day after Miller had begun the East Coast tour that would take him to Washington, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—as the council of Smith’s top advisers was known—and other church leaders met at the office of the mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois, the wandering saints’ latest home base. It was a friendly venue: among Smith’s many titles was mayor. A motion was made that Smith should run for president and that those in attendance should employ “all honorable means … to secure his election.”
“If you attempt to accomplish this,” Smith told those gathered, “you must send every man in the city who is able to speak in public throughout the land to electioneer and make stump speeches, advocate the ‘Mormon’ religion, purity of elections, and call upon the people to stand by the law and put down mobocracy.”
The Mormon newspaper took up the call. “Our interests, our property, our lives and the lives of our families are too dear to us to be sacrificed at the shrine of party-spirit, and to gratify party feelings,” the Times and Seasons reported. “Under existing circumstances we have no other alternative, and if we can accomplish our object well, if not we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we have acted conscientiously and have used our best judgment; and if we have to throw away our votes, we had better do so upon a worthy, rather than upon an unworthy individual, who might make use of the weapon we put in his hand to destroy us with.”
The cause of the Mormon consternation with the political and legal process went back to the founding of the movement with the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830. At each stop where the church hoped to set up its Zion, mobs—unofficial and official—had hounded members and, in many cases, committed violence, personal and legal. Fleeing from their first Zion in Ohio, the saints relocated to Missouri, where locals objected to their religious practices and to their communitarian spirit, which included the habit of voting as a unit. Sporadic violence increased along with the number of Mormon émigrés to the Show Me State and erupted into the “Mormon War” of 1838. The blame lay mostly with anti-Mormon locals, but Democratic governor Lillburn Boggs blamed the saints and issued his infamous Executive Order 44, which called for Mormons to be “exterminated or driven from the State.”
Smith and other church leaders were arrested and their followers began fleeing into Illinois. They settled on a spit of land along the Mississippi River that had once been the site of a Sac and Fox village and was described by one writer as “a malarial riverbottom swamp,” although another described the surrounding country as “really beautiful, the land being of the best quality, with an abundance of timber, &c.” They changed the town’s name from Commerce to Nauvoo, which Smith said was a Hebrew word meaning “beautiful place,” and began rebuilding their lives once again. After four months’ confinement in Missouri, Smith, his brother Hyrum, and three others escaped, with a little help from their guards. A week later, they were in Nauvoo.
Six months after fleeing Missouri justice, Joseph Smith headed for Washington, hoping to enlist the aid of the federal government in protecting his people’s constitutional rights. Smith and Elias Higbee, the official church historian, arrived in the capital on November 28 and wasted no time. After setting up shop at the National Hotel, they went the next day to the White House. In those days, no appointment was necessary and security was all but unheard of. The two Mormon leaders were accompanied by Illinois Representative John Reynolds, a Democrat who introduced the pair to President Martin Van Buren. After a few pleasantries, the men got down to business.
Smith found Van Buren less than sympathetic. Like most Americans, the president considered Mormons to be, at best, peculiar, certainly heretical, and maybe worse. But their greatest sin, as far as Van Buren was concerned, was that coming to the aid of their relatively small group might cost him some votes. “What can I do?” he asked plaintively. “I can do nothing for you. If I do anything, I shall come in contact with the whole state of Missouri.” Missouri’s four electoral votes might prove decisive in what was expected to be a close fight for reelection in 1840.
NAUVOO. Library of Congress
Having found no friend in the White House, Smith and Higbee turned to Congress. In meetings with the Illinois delegation, they were afforded the respect any influential constituents might expect. They were given a fair hearing and allowed to present a petition, with 678 signatures, seeking compensation for the losses they suffered in Missouri, estimated at about $2 million. The lawmakers helped the religious leaders prepare their case. But all the effort was to no avail. The Senate Judiciary Committee ruled that Congress could not act, and the Mormons needed to seek redress in the Missouri courts, a step Smith knew would be futile. The saints would have to look elsewhere for justice.
Though the appeal to official Washington proved fruitless, for the most part Illinois state officials gave the Mormons wide latitude to set up their own institutions, a freedom they pursued with great vigor. A liberal city charter granted by the state legislature allowed them to establish friendly courts and organize a militia—headed by General Joseph Smith—called the Nauvoo Legion. Smith continued to operate under the cloud of possible extradition to Missouri, though the local Mormon-dominated court system was effective in blocking those efforts.
But, just as had happened in Ohio and Missouri, suspicious and bigoted local residents began to agitate against the saints, aided by Mormon apostates—“a few artless villains,” the Times and Seasons called them—who didn’t like the way Smith was running things or what they knew or had heard about the practice of polygamy. “A chosen people is probably inspiring for the chosen to live among,” Wallace Stegner noted, “but it is not so comfortable for outsiders to live with.” Even if Smith might have agreed with that sentiment, he would not have considered the discomfort of outsiders reason enough to surrender his people’s constitutional rights.
The agitation would come to a head by the summer of 1844, but first Smith had to put together a presidential campaign. He began with a manifesto, presented in public for the first time on February 8 and published in pamphlet form as General Smith’s Views of the Powers and Policy of the Government of the United States on February 24. Fifteen hundred copies were mailed to prominent citizens, including Van Buren and his cabinet, the US Supreme Court, members of Congress, and major newspapers. A mix of utopian idealism and practical American politics, with a dash of biblical-inspired skull-cracking, General Smith’s Views was reprinted in the May 15, 1844, edition of the Times and Seasons.
We have had democratic presidents; whig presidents; a pseudo democratic whig president, and now it is time to have a president of the United States; and let the people of the whole union, like the inflexible Romans, whenever they find a promise made by a candidate, that is not practised as an officer, hurl the miserable sycophant from his exaltation, as God did Nebuchadnezzar, to crop the grass of the field, with a beast’s heart among the cattle.
Despite the ecumenical tone, Smith took some controversial stands that crossed party lines. He called for slavery’s abolition not through force but through gradual, compensated emancipation. He would pay slave owners for their surrendered property out of proceeds from the sale of public lands. His calls for prison reform went far beyond any others of his day, urging voters to “Petition your state legislature to pardon every convict in their several penitentiaries: blessing them as they go, and saying to them in the name of the Lord, go thy way and sin no more.” He wanted imprisonment to be replaced by public works performed by convicts. He backed creation of a national bank, but with limited powers and branches in the states.
Penal policy aside, most of that was more or less in the mainstream of American political thought in the middle of the nineteenth century, although the compensated emancipation plank would gain few if any adherents in the South. But on the question of the role of the federal government, Smith was a true outlier, anticipating by more than a century the expanded power of Washington to enforce constitutional rights against violations by states and individuals.
Give every man his constitutional freedom, and the president full power to send an army to suppress mobs; and the states authority to repeal and impugn that relic of folly, which makes it necessary for the governor of a state to make the demand of the president for troops, in cases of invasion or rebellion. The governor himself may be a mobber and, instead of being punished, as he should be for murder and treason, he may destroy the very lives, rights, and property he should protect.
General Smith’s Views, indeed his entire presidential campaign, represented a convergence of the prophet’s theological and political opinions. “In the millenarian mood of the early years,” Smith’s best biographer, Richard Lyman Bushman, writes, “the nation’s destiny, its elections, even its history meant little in light of the Second Coming.” Starting from the same eschatological position as William Miller, Smith had taken a turn and moved into American political life, eschewing end-of-the-worldism in favor of fix-the-worldism. Miller’s predicted end had not come in March 1844. At the same time Smith was shifting his quixotic presidential race into gear, Miller and his followers were adjusting their calculations and preparing a new date for the end of the world. Miller, looking heavenward, thought the world was doomed and was preparing for its demise. Smith thought the world—and America—eminently savable, and he meant to save them.
One question on which Smith deviated little from the prevailing political winds was westward expansion. Even as he was planning and executing his presidential campaign, Smith was in the early stages of developing a plan for moving the Mormon people once more, this time to Oregon, California, or Texas. Two weeks after the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had nominated him for president, Smith empowered them to mount an exploratory visit to find a new home where they might “have a government of our own.” This was not yet an exodus; Smith wanted more than one base for the Mormon people, but he saw the unfettered West as an outlet, and Texas was included in the list of possibilities. “The whole of America is Zion” was Smith’s view. Brigham Young, one of the Twelve, looked at his task as finding “the best manner to settle our people in some distant and unoccupied territory, where we could enjoy our civil and religious beliefs without being subject to constant oppression and mobocracy.” An envoy was sent to Texas to talk things over with Texas president Sam Houston, who was enthusiastic about the possibility of new recruits.
But this was not in the interest of fleeing from US jurisdiction. If Smith wanted the Mormons in Texas, he wanted Texas in the union. In General Smith’s Views, the prophet supported the annexation of Texas and hoped to see “the union spread from the east to the west sea; and if Texas petitions Congress to be adopted among the sons of liberty, give her the right hand of fellowship.”
Outside Smith’s manifesto, there was little fellowship to be had on the question of Texas annexation. His reference to “sons of liberty” was crucial. Smith wanted Texas in the union, but as a free state. That was a pipe dream. For the nonutopian presidential candidates, and for the members of Congress and of Tyler’s cabinet who would have to make the decision, the question was much simpler. Texas would remain a slaveholding empire. Would it be that inside the union or out?
Talk of annexation predated Texas’s independence from Mexico in 1836. Some hardliners claimed the area was part of the Louisiana Purchase, a claim that was bargained away in exchange for the Floridas by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in the Adams-Onis Treaty between the United States and Spain in 1819. After Moses Austin received his 1821 land grant from the Mexican government and his son Stephen began colonizing the region along the Brazos River with American settlers—almost 150,000 by 1844—the idea of Texas joining the union quickly began to take hold. The heroic defense of the Alamo in 1836, the subsequent declaration of independence, and the ultimately successful military revolt against Mexican rule turned the idea of annexation into something more than a goal for the distant future. Texans were for it. The Democrats who ran the national government in Washington, especially President Martin Van Buren, were wary. Yet continued violations of Texas’s hard-won sovereignty provided an emotional element. Americans sympathized with their national brethren against the depredations of the former Mexican masters.
But until 1844, the issue never fully took hold of the public imagination. That’s one reason the annexation negotiators were able to keep their talks secret, which most likely aided in their success. Andrew Jackson wrote to his old friend Sam Houston that keeping the talks behind closed doors “prevents that arch fiend, J. Q. Adams, from writing memorials and circulating them for signatures.” Negotiator Isaac Van Zandt kept his boss, Texas secretary of state Anson Jones, informed of the progress. Jones responded by dismissing the idea. Annexation would mean war with Mexico, he told Van Zandt. Houston backed annexation, but assumed for much the same reason as Jones that it would not win Senate approval.
Despite these warnings from above, Van Zandt soldiered on. He continued his talks with US secretary of state Abel Upshur through the autumn of 1843 and into the following winter. Like Van Zandt, Upshur had received warnings against proceeding. Juan Almonte, the Mexican minister to the United States, got wind of the talks and told Upshur point-blank that annexation would bring war. A worried Houston decided to send James Pinckney Henderson, an experienced diplomat who had negotiated trade deals and foreign recognition for Texas, to supplement the delegation. The night before the explosion aboard the Princeton—before Henderson’s arrival—Upshur had concluded the negotiations with Van Zandt. All that remained now was the signing of a formal treaty, which would then have to be approved by the Senate.
Official Washington had been hearing rumors of the negotiations for months, and Whigs—along with a few Northern Democrats—were beginning to grumble. But Upshur had reason to believe that the ratification process would go smoothly: he interpreted his easy Senate confirmation as tantamount to support for annexation; Jackson was confident; Upshur could mine a deep vein of anti-British feeling (England had been meddling in Texas affairs almost from the moment of its independence from Mexico); and there was wide support for territorial expansion among the people and in Congress. In a January 1844 letter to the American chargé d’affaires in Texas, Upshur asserted that annexation was favored by two-thirds of the Senate.
Unfortunately for Upshur and supporters of annexation, the expectations of smooth sailing were blown to pieces aboard the Princeton. Upshur, a Virginian like Tyler, had been an ardent sectionalist. He backed John C. Calhoun for president and believed that Texas was the key to uniting Southerners behind Calhoun’s candidacy. He was committed to bringing Texas into the union for a variety of reasons, including the expansion of slave territory. But he was also pragmatic enough to know that nationalism, not sectionalism, was the way to sell annexation.
On March 6, a week after Upshur’s death, Tyler chose Calhoun to take over the State Department—“the only man in the country who could meet all the exigencies of the crisis,” according to Virginian Henry A. Wise. Fellow South Carolinian George McDuffie, who would play a central role in the coming Senate debate on Texas, carried Tyler’s request for Calhoun to join the cabinet. “The President is very anxious that you should accept and come on immediately as the Texas negotiation admits of no delay,” he wrote.
Like Tyler, Calhoun was a man without a party. A onetime proto-Whig who had become a Democrat and then resigned the vice presidency in a dispute with Andrew Jackson, Calhoun had moved from being a states-rights advocate to the more extreme position of Southern separatist, leaving him outside the mainstream of both political parties. Historians have puzzled over why Tyler chose the mercurial South Carolinian to be the key man on the issue upon which the success or failure of his presidency now rested. Calhoun’s friends assumed Tyler would subtly suggest a quid pro quo—the State Department in return for Calhoun’s support of Tyler’s reelection.
That certainly would have been in keeping with the president’s method of operation. A desire to derail another potential contender might have played a part in another of Tyler’s post-Princeton machinations. To replace Thomas Gilmer at the Navy Department, he quickly settled on fellow Virginian John Y. Mason, a former House member and now district court judge. Mason waffled, so Tyler directed an operative to approach former Speaker of the House James K. Polk to gauge the Tennessean’s interest in the job. Polk had served seven terms in the House in the 1820s and ’30s and one term as Speaker, and lost two races for governor. Now he was angling to be chosen as the number-two man on a presidential ticket with Martin Van Buren. On March 10, Theophilus Fisk, a Virginia newspaper editor loyal to Tyler, wrote to inquire “whether it would meet with your approbation to be tendered a place in his Cabinet.” Noting the “melancholy death” of Gilmer, Fisk asked Polk if he would “consent to take it if tendered to you without any pledge, shackle or trammel being asked of you?”
Polk’s eyes were cast in another direction, which turned out to be a good thing, because three days after the offer was extended, Fisk had to withdraw it when Mason decided he did want the job. No matter. Before Polk received the second Fisk letter, he humbly responded to the first, allowing that “there are many others, whose services the President can command, who could render more service to the country than I could.”
Polk’s phantom appointment would become an ironic historical footnote. Not so Calhoun’s. Whatever Tyler’s reasons for selecting the South Carolinian, he would quickly come to regret the choice. Tyler’s message was national—extend American influence across the continent and end British interference in Texas, Oregon, and beyond. The most celebrated defense of this position came in a pamphlet by Mississippi senator Robert Walker, which argued that Texas annexation was an unadulterated good. There was something for everybody in it—more land, harbors for trade, a diminution of British power. And, Walker wrote, the addition of Texas to the union would dilute slavery, pushing it south and west, so that states of the middle border and perhaps even the upper South would eventually see the end of the peculiar institution. Others had made a similar argument with seeming sincerity. Whether Walker actually believed it or not was irrelevant. It was a shrewd way to make the case for Texas annexation to wary Northerners, and a fund established by well-off Southerners paid to have hundreds of thousands of copies of Walker’s letter distributed in the North.
Calhoun might have believed Walker’s argument about the dilution of slavery, but he didn’t believe it would be a good thing. He wanted to deliver a different message. The South, the new secretary of state asserted, was under assault, which meant slavery—a positive good, in Calhoun’s eyes—was also threatened. The North was growing in population relative to the South. Abolitionists, who not too many years earlier had been considered a lunatic fringe, had begun to make serious inroads in the political system. Most immediately, the years-long congressional debate over the so-called gag rule, which barred discussion or referral to committee of antislavery petitions in the House, was coming to a head.
The year 1831 had been a propitious one for the embryonic abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison founded the newspaper the Liberator, abolitionists in Boston founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and slaves led by Nat Turner rose up against their masters in Virginia. Southerners were annoyed by Garrison and the fledgling society. They were scared to death by Turner.
Two years later, the American Anti-Slavery Society was founded. Its leaders soon launched a campaign to petition Congress to end slavery. Petitions poured in by the thousands. Congress had not seen anything like it since the efforts in the 1810s and ’20s to repeal an 1810 law that required post offices to remain open on Sundays, an exercise in civics that served as a sort of dress rehearsal for the religious-infused abolitionist efforts of the 1830s and included many of the same activists.
By 1836, pro-slavery Democrats were complaining that Congress could hardly get its work done for all the time devoted to dealing with abolitionist petitions. This was a specious argument, but it worked, with an assist from Whigs who saw political peril in discussion of slavery and preferred that the issue simply go away. Under the leadership of Speaker James K. Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder, this coalition adopted a rule that automatically tabled all antislavery petitions—in blatant violation, opponents argued, of the First Amendment guarantee of the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances—and extended the ban in succeeding Congresses.
Each new Congress brought a renewed effort, led by former president and now Massachusetts congressman John Quincy Adams, to repeal the gag rule. Adams would pound and pontificate, deliver sermons on the sanctity of the right of petition and denounce the “slave power” that dominated the House of Representatives. Often he did it with a sense of humor, but laughter—earned or offered—never buried the outrage.
Gentlemen of the South, why will you not discuss this question? Do you fear the argument? If not, why do you refuse to enter into it? If you are so firm, so confident, so immovably resolute, why will you not speak? I call upon you to speak; explain this subject to us who do not understand it. Show us the “blessings” of this institution. Let us look at them. I believe some of you think that slavery is a blessing which we ought to take ourselves. If so, give your reasons; show us how it will be for our interest, and how it can be made to conform to our sense of duty. Perhaps we shall come round; who knows but you may convert us? I do not resist; I am open to conviction. Suppose you try it.
But the louder Adams protested, the less the Democracy, as the Democratic Party and its adherents were often called, seemed to listen. Year after year he challenged the gag rule and, while victory on occasion seemed to be at hand, year after year he failed. Even when the Whigs captured control of both houses of Congress in 1840—the only time they would do so in the brief life of the party—he could not win assent to a change in the rules. When Democrats regained control of the House by a whopping 142–79 margin in 1842, the cause seemed lost.
In those days, a Congress elected in November would not begin meeting until December of the following year. The ousted Congress would return a month after Election Day for a lame-duck session that lasted until they concluded their business in late spring or early summer. Upon adjournment Washington, under normal circumstances, would then be free from the ravages of Congress until the newly elected members gathered. The twenty-eighth Congress convened on December 4, 1843. Unhappy with Tyler, voters thirteen months earlier had tossed out the Whigs and turned Congress back over to the Democrats.
Adams estimated in April 1844 that “the standing supremacy of the slave representation is 112, a bare majority of the House, consisting of 80 slave-holders and thirty-two free-trade auxiliaries.” Adams aimed to target the auxiliaries, some of whom sensed that the sands were shifting beneath their feet. Northern Democrats were growing increasingly uneasy about appearing to the public as being in favor of such an undemocratic proposition as the gag rule. Their party brethren from the South had bigger, Texas-sized fish to fry. It might be better to ungag the House, some reasoned, than to risk splitting the party at such a crucial moment.
When the new Congress convened, the motion was made to renew the rules from the twenty-seventh Congress. Adams, referring to the “life-and-death struggle for the right of petition,” moved to delete the gag rule from the package. Procedural votes early in 1844 went Adams’s way. But, as had happened on several other occasions, supporters of the gag rule marshaled their forces for the decisive confrontation, and again they prevailed, this time by a single vote, 88–87. Adams laid the blame at the feet of the New York delegation, whom he accused of supporting the gag rule to protect Southern support for Van Buren. Later that same day, the Peacemaker exploded on the Princeton.
Lawmakers opposed to the gag rule took some comfort in those numbers, and knew they would have another chance after the election was settled and, they felt certain, Clay was in the White House. They had waited this long. They could wait a few more months.
Calhoun was a radical, but he was not delusional. And he could count. The slow ebb of Southern power in Congress was not a figment of his imagination, as the close vote on the gag rule demonstrated. He saw the addition of Texas to the union as a way to stanch the flow of power northward. Further, he saw the public debate over annexation as a forum in which to rally the South to defend its prerogatives. Winning wasn’t enough. They had to win for the right reasons. Southerners, Upshur had written to Calhoun six months before his death, were “far too lethargic upon the vital question. They ought to be roused and made of one mind.” Calhoun intended to rouse them.
Adams and his allies saw the battles over the gag rule and Texas annexation as two fronts in the same war, just as Calhoun did. But while Adams possessed the loudest Whig voice in Congress on both issues, his was not the Whig voice that mattered most on Texas. That belonged to a man who had resigned from the Senate in 1842—and he was not yet talking, at least not in public.
Fed up with Tyler’s apostasy to the Whig faith, demoralized with his inability to move the debate, and worn out by his declining health, Henry Clay had left Congress to rest, recuperate, and plan his presidential campaign. When Texas reared its head on the national political scene, Clay would rather have been talking about almost anything else. As a candidate for the White House, the Kentuckian wanted to debate the tariff, a national bank, internal improvements. Texas, he sensed, was a trap, and he would put off formally addressing the issue as long as he felt he could, although he had been expressing his opposition privately for some time. When he finally decided to go on the record, just before Tyler sent the annexation treaty to the Senate, Clay did so against the advice of friends and advisers, who feared he could do himself little good and plenty of harm. Clay, as always, was supremely confident in his ability to finesse controversy by splitting the difference. It had worked for him many times before, but it would not work on Texas.
Whigs not running for president did not have to be so circumspect. The annexation of Texas, wrote Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, “would be a transfer of our political power to the slaveholders and a base and degrading surrender of ourselves to the power and protection of slavery. It is the most abominable proposition with which a free people were ever insulted.” Adams was just as overwrought. “The treaty for the annexation of Texas was this day [April 22] sent in to the Senate and with it went the freedom of the human race,” he confided to his diary.
The treaty Upshur and Van Zandt had negotiated was, with a few minor changes, the treaty Calhoun and Henderson signed off on. The Calhoun-led, post-Upshur stage of the talks was largely uneventful. Henderson and Van Zandt feared that sending a note back to Texas for final instructions might delay action and doom the chances for ratification, and they may have been right. Jones and Houston were privately unhappy with some of the provisions—no statehood, no guarantee of defense from Mexican violence—but they kept their complaints out of the public view. Van Zandt and Henderson signed the treaty April 12 on their own authority, just two weeks after Calhoun took over. “The voice of the country,” Calhoun wrote the next day, “is so decidedly in favor of annexation that any hesitancy on the part of the doubtful will probably give way to it.” Ten days later, Tyler submitted the agreement to the Senate, where the debate would be anything but uneventful.
While the politicians in Washington were preparing to consider Texas, William Miller was considering a new deadline for the second coming and Joseph Smith was preparing to expand his presidential campaign.
After the disappointment of Christ’s non-appearance, confused and depressed Millerites looked to Miller and other leaders of the movement in search of what would come next. Some drifted away and “walked no more with us,” as Miller put it. But most still believed and were looking for guidance. In the days and weeks immediately following what came to be called “the spring disappointment,” Miller was ambivalent. He admitted his error, but couldn’t say exactly how or why it had happened. “I can’t see where I’m wrong,” he wrote. He could say, though, that he was as certain as ever of Christ’s soon coming.
“I confess my error, and acknowledge my disappointment; yet I still believe that the day of the Lord is near, even at the door; and I exhort you, my brethren, to be watchful, and not let that day come upon you unawares. The wicked, the proud, and the bigot will exult over us. I will try to be patient. God will deliver the godly out of temptation, and will reserve the unjust to be punished at Christ’s appearing,” Miller wrote. As always, he urged followers seeking answers to resort to the Bible, not to man, for solace.
While Miller reassessed, others stepped in to fill the vacuum. Among the most colorful of these characters was John Starkweather, Joshua Himes’s assistant pastor at the Chardon Street Chapel in Boston. He differed from Miller, who considered premillennialism the distinguishing tenet of his movement and was not interested in deviating from other Bible teachings (and believed that premillennialism was itself not a deviation). Starkweather, on the other hand, preached not only that one had to take Christ into one’s heart in order to be saved, but also that a physical manifestation—a bodily weakness or some other outward sign—was necessary to gain God’s favor. He attracted a following among the more extreme elements of Millerism, while the leadership quickly moved to disown him. Himes called his practices “abominations” and sent him packing from Chardon Street. Starkweather kept right on. Some of his antics bordered on the ridiculous, even in the context of the sometimes bizarre rituals associated with some evangelical and perfectionist elements during the Second Great Awakening. He would wave a tree branch over the heads of his crowds to determine who was saved, for example. He urged his congregations to eschew things of the world, including their sets of false teeth.
After the spring disappointment, Starkweather made a final attempt to shave off a sizable portion of the Millerite contingent for his own by bringing together a host of disappointed and disaffected believers. But, as tends to happen with gatherings of people who are already up in arms, the meeting devolved into chaos. “No two were of one mind,” wrote Himes’s friends. “Each wished to lead off in his own direction.”
And so they did. Starkweather was never able to bring the disparate groups together and he would fade away rather quickly. But a modified brand of his fanaticism would reemerge for one last demonstration later in the year, thanks in large part to the work of another Millerite leader, who claimed to have found the error that Miller himself could not divine.
As early as February 1844, Samuel S. Snow had argued in the pages of the Midnight Cry that the spring date for the second coming was wrong. Miller had always been softer on the date than many of his lieutenants, but was not yet ready to accept that Snow had found the final answer. Editors added caveats to Snow’s article in the Midnight Cry and again when it was reprinted in the Advent Herald on April 3. By May they were beginning to come around, though it would take another four months for Snow’s new date to receive any kind of official endorsement, and even longer for Miller to lend his wholehearted support.
Snow’s argument, like so much of Millerite theology, was arcane. His interpretation of Daniel 8:14 was that the twenty-three-hundred-year period ended in 1844 rather than 1843. That pushed the second coming back seven months to October 22, in conjunction with the Jewish Day of Atonement. Snow had already begun preaching the new date before the spring disappointment. After, he picked up the pace, traveling to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, receiving enthusiastic notices from Millerites happy to have a renewed vision.
As Snow’s ministry began to take hold of the Millerite imagination in the late spring, Miller was beginning to regain his footing. He planned a tour of the west, to commence in July, that would take him across New York to Canada and Ohio. But even as these plans were being laid, it was becoming clear that other personalities would carry the Millerite melodrama to its final act.
Joseph Smith’s act, meanwhile, was kicking into high gear. If his campaign was symbolic, it was a symbol filled with substance. He employed the ready-made Mormon missionary force as campaign foot soldiers, proudly proclaiming “there is oratory enough in the Church to carry me into the Presidential chair.” More than three hundred volunteers joined up. April saw forty-seven campaign events scheduled across fourteen states to deliver the message. All told, campaigners were assigned to every state—New York got the most, with forty-seven—and to the Wisconsin Territory, which got one. The Mormon newspaper the Times and Seasons covered the campaign extensively, reprinting Smith’s policy manifesto, his correspondence with the major party candidates, and other campaign news.
Non-Mormon newspapers also took notice, more often than not in considerably less flattering terms than those of the Times and Seasons. A New York Tribune correspondent wrote of Smith: “none who know him can respect him. They cannot respect him for his sincerity—for he cannot be sincere; he cannot be the victim of his own delusion. They cannot esteem him for his piety—for he does not even profess to be pious—and he is notoriously the greatest blasphemer and railer in the country.” Hancock County’s Warsaw Signal published a letter to “JO SMITH—Prophet—Candidate for the Presidency—Mayor of the City of Nauvoo—Lieutenant General of the Legion—President of the Church—Tavern Keeper—Grog Bruiser—&c., &c.” Claiming the “unalienable right of an American Citizen” to ask questions of presidential candidates, the paper wondered “what would you do with the State of Missouri? Would you pluck out the eyes of her sovereignty? Or would you take her up in your expanded arms, and giant-like stride across the Western Prairies—leap the Rocky Mountains and hurl her headlong into the angry Pacific, there to remain until purged of every Anti-Mormon sin? Or Jo, would you Xerxes-like muster your myriads, and every man armed with a hoop-pole, march across the icy bridge in winter time, and give her Sovereign Highness, a most transcendent drubbing?”
Such prejudices were to be expected. To counteract them, Smith sent ten members of the Quorum of the Twelve, including Brigham Young, out on campaign missions. “I am in my cauling and duing my duty,” Young wrote to his wife, Mary Ann. He and his compatriots preached and politicked in St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Boston, and the saints’ former home base in Kirtland, Ohio. Wilford Woodruff, another of the Twelve, left Nauvoo on May 9 with three colleagues on a nine-week electioneering mission. He delivered speeches at a half-dozen political meetings, often in schoolhouses, always being meticulous about separating his preaching from his politicking—the political speeches tended to come the night before the religious services he conducted on the trip. Others also typically did their politicking either the day before or the day after the religious meetings, which proved successful. During the campaign season, newspapers reported on mass Mormon conversions in Mississippi and Alabama, without mentioning any political activity.
Smith was officially nominated by the Illinois state convention of his supporters—largely Latter Day Saints but including a sprinkling of Gentiles—which he organized and hosted in Nauvoo on May 17. Even though it was characterized as a state convention, delegates came from all twenty-six states. Ten Illinois counties were represented, but most of the attendees lived in Nauvoo. Two non-LDS delegates, G. W. Goforth and John S. Reid, were given prominent speaking roles. Reid, Smith’s onetime attorney, offered the colorful hope that the prophet would “live to put his foot upon the neck of his enemies in love and meekness.” Smith had at first sought to include James Arlington Bennett, a New York lawyer who had been baptized into the faith by Brigham Young, as his vice presidential candidate. But Bennett had been born in Ireland and was thus ineligible. He looked next to Colonel Solomon Copeland, one of the leading saints from Tennessee, but ultimately settled on Sidney Rigdon, an early Mormon convert and Smith’s fellow escapee from the Liberty Jail in Missouri. Having concluded their business, the state-level delegates planned a truly national convention to be held July 13 in Baltimore.
So, while Joseph Smith and his followers were engaging humanity, William Miller and his flock were planning for humanity’s earthly destruction. Many people considered both to be fools. Neither cared much what other people thought. Miller trudged along as always, defiant in his simplicity. Smith, too, knew he was not on a fool’s errand, and he had not sent his lieutenants on one. The prophet understood fully that he would not be elected president, but that didn’t mean he was not a serious candidate. The campaign afforded him a chance to spread the word about Mormonism and put its case before the people and their leaders. Pointing toward a time when Mormonism would stand inside the big tent of American culture, Smith’s focus was relentlessly on the future. That is more than could be said for the man most people believed would win the White House in 1844.