GRANT, Jedediah Morgan.
Three letters to the New York Herald, from J. M. Grant, of Utah. [New York? 1852?] 64 pp. 23 cm.
View Document
Jedediah M. Grant had been a member of the First Council of Seventy for almost seven years and mayor of Great Salt Lake City for about eight months when he left Salt Lake City for Kanesville on September 24, 1851, to assist Ezra T. Benson with the Mormon immigration. But the nature of this mission changed on October 1, three days after the federal territorial appointees--judges Lemuel G. Brandebury and Perry E. Brocchus, territorial secretary Broughton D. Harris, and sub-Indian agent Henry R. Day--abruptly left Salt Lake City for the East. Now he was to go on to Washington and help John M. Bernhisel and Thomas L. Kane defuse the sensational reports the Church leaders knew would be forthcoming from the "runaway" appointees.
Grant reached Washington on December 8, two days after Brandebury and Harris. Early statements from the appointees had been appearing in the eastern newspapers since the first week of November, and on December 19 Brandebury, Brocchus, and Harris submitted their formal report to President Fillmore. This report dwelled mainly on what they perceived to be examples of disloyalty and disrespect toward the federal government--and themselves--and irregularities in establishing the territorial government; its comments on Mormon polygamy were confined to essentially one paragraph. But it was polygamy, Grant made clear in his correspondence, that most concerned the Congress and the Fillmore administration.
Jedediah Grant was eager to respond, but the cautious Bernhisel restrained him from making any public expression for two months. Then in February he and Thomas L. Kane struck upon a plan to write a series of letters to the
New York Herald refuting the Brandebury-Brocchus-Harris allegations. The first of the letters appeared in the
Herald of March 9, 1852, together with an editorial comment by the editor, James Gordon Bennett. When Bennett declined to print the second letter in its entirety, Grant concluded to publish the series in pamphlet form, and writing from New York on May 13, he reported that his
Three Letters to the New York Herald was "completed and ready for circulation."
The first fifty pages of
Three Letters to the New York Herald contain the letters, identified as
Letter I, II, and III. Each is addressed to James Gordon Bennett and signed only by Grant. The first is undated--although it was dated March 4, 1852 in the
Herald; the second is dated at the beginning, April 8, 1852; and the third is dated at the end, New York, April 25, 1852. The remaining fourteen pages comprise a four-part appendix. The first part is a letter from Grant to Millard Fillmore transmitting a copy of the pamphlet, dated at New York, May 1, 1852. The second is an extract of Perry E. Brocchus's letter of September 20, 1851, from
Utah: Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Information in Reference to the Condition of Affairs in the Territory of Utah (32d Cong., 1st sess., House Ex. Doc. 25), pp. 5B6, or
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, vol. 25, pp. 85-86. The third is an account of the murder of Joseph Smith. And the fourth is a series of documents pertaining to the anti-Mormon violence in Missouri: Joseph Young's--not David Lewis's--account of the Haun's Mill Massacre followed by Lewis's account, probably from Sidney Rigdon's
An Appeal to the American People; then the testimony of Hyrum Smith, Rigdon, and Parley P. Pratt, followed by an excerpt of General John B. Clark's speech of November 6, 1838, all from the
Times and Seasons of July 1 and 15, and August 1, 1843.
Grant's first letter is essentially a tongue-in-cheek recounting of the appointees experiences in Utah. An excerpt:
It is an error, the prevalent opinion that we all cleanse the nasal orifice with the big toe, and make tea with holy water. We have among us women who play on the piano and mix French with their talk, and men who like tight boots, and who think more of the grammar than the meaning of what they are saying; and who would ask nothing better than to be fed by other people for squaring circles and writing dead languages all their lives--albeit we would not give one good gunsmith's apprentice for the whole of them.
Brandebury is portrayed as a benign incompetent, whose principal offense was failing to bathe. Brocchus, on the other hand, is painted as a vindictive opportunist, who fostered the contention with the Mormons.
Prompted by James Gordon Bennett's comment that "the pith of the charges" were not answered in the first letter, Grant begins his second with a point-by-point denial of the allegations outlined in the third paragraph of the Brandebury-Brocchus-Harris report. He defends the character of Brigham Young, asking if "he is to be outlawed because he holds unpopular opinions of Zachary Taylor," and justifies the tone of Daniel H. Wells's oration because of the anti-Mormon violence in Missouri and Illinois. In his third letter, Grant expresses the view that the appointees were men who were "not conscience driven," who came to the territory for "Money or Political Honors" and then left when they realized such rewards would not come to them in Utah. The Brandebury-Brocchus-Harris report mentions the murders of John M. Vaughan and James M. Monroe, and Grant summarizes the facts in these cases and argues that the killings were justified because Vaughan and Monroe had seduced their killer's' wives. He deals with polygamy in one paragraph by denying that Brigham Young rode "with his score of wives, and a sucking baby a-piece, airing in one omnibus" and then declaring: "But, as to this charge of Polygamy again: Suppose I should admit it at once; whose business is it? Does the Constitution forbid it? Is here any thing in the Act for the Government of the Territory, forbidding it?"
To what extent Grant's pamphlet affected the actions of the federal government is difficult to assess. Bernhisel reported to Kane that it "created quite a sensation" in Washington and that Senator Hamlin, of Maine, remarked that "it had confirmed him in what he believed before, that the returned officers were d--d scoundrels." But before
Three Letters to the New York Herald appeared, the Fillmore administration had concluded to retain Brigham Young as territorial governor and Fillmore had nominated Orson Hyde as a supreme court justice and Benjamin G. Ferris, a non-Mormon, as territorial secretary. Undoubtedly, like Senator Hamlin, the administration quickly lost confidence in the appointees, who had abandoned their offices over what amounted to little more than some name-calling.
Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley,
A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume Two, 1848-1852. Forthcoming.
Used by permission of the author.
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY