“Who’s in Charge Here?”: Utah Expedition Command Ambiguity

1. For a review of this Utah-centric label’s use and implications, see Gene A. Sessions, “The Legend of ‘Johnston’s Army’: Myth and Reality among the Mormons,” Paper presented at the Mormon History Association annual conference, Salt Lake City, May 26, 2007.

2. The Utah War of 1857-58 was the armed confrontation between the administration of President James Buchanan and the civil-religious leadership of Utah Territory led by Governor Brigham Young, second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At stake were power and authority in Utah, through a conflict that pitted its large, experienced territorial militia (Nauvoo Legion) against a federal force (Utah Expedition) that ultimately involved nearly one-third of the U.S. Army. The most complete and recent narrative and documentary histories of the war are: Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict 1850-1859 (1960; rpt., New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1: A Documentary History of the Utah War to 1858 (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008); and LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen, eds., The Utah Expedition, 1857-1858: A Documentary Account of the United States Military Movement under Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, and the Resistance by Brigham Young and the Mormon Nauvoo Legion (1958; rpt., Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1982). The latter study was most recently reprinted as Mormon Resistance: A Documentary Account of the Utah Expedition, 1857-1858 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). A useful but limited study of the conflict’s immediate aftermath is Donald R. Moorman with Gene A. Sessions, Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005). Context for the war is found in David L. Bigler, Forgotten Kingdom: The Mormon Theocracy in the American West, 1847-1896 (Spokane, Wash.: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1998), while valuable information about the war itself is contained in three quite different interpretations of its worst atrocity: Will Bagley, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002); Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), and Bigler and Bagley, Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (Norman: Arthur H. Clark Co., 2008).

3. An extreme example was Colonel John DeBarth Walbach, commander of the Fourth U.S. Artillery, who died on the eve of the Utah War in his ninety-third year—an officer beloved but so old that he had served under George Washington. Even the best and the brightest officers languished under this constipated, seniority-driven “system.” Robert E. Lee, one of Winfield Scott’s favorites, was still only a captain of engineers twenty-six years after heading his West Point class of 1829. Lee did not receive his first troop command until his 1855 promotion at age forty-eight as lieutenant colonel of the newly established Second U.S. Cavalry led by fifty-two-year-old Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston.

4. For a discussion of these structural, environmental, and behavioral forces as they impacted the contentious career of the antebellum army’s second most senior officer, see William P. MacKinnon, “David Emanuel Twiggs,” in Dictionary of American Military Biography, edited by Roger J. Spiller, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 3:1119-22. A classic description of young Braxton Bragg’s prolonged quarrel with himself in his dual roles as a frontier company commander as well as his own company quartermaster appears in Grady McWhiney, Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 1:33-34. For Winfield Scott’s intervention in Kansas to prevent the court-martial of key officers over minor matters as the Utah Expedition was being organized, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 163-64, 369-70.

5. Allan Peskin, Winfield Scott and the Profession of Arms (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003).

6. See Records of the Judge Advocate (RG 154), National Archives, Washington, D.C., for the most seriously disruptive of these incidents—those that were adjudicated by general court-martial.

7. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, chap. 7. For a colorful but rueful account of the brutal Twiggs-Harney command style written decades later by one of their still-smarting quartermasters, see Parmenas Taylor Turnley, Reminiscences . . . (Chicago, Ill.: Donohue & Henneberry, 1893), 208-9.

8. John B. Floyd, Letter to James Buchanan, August 5, 1858, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

9. For the timing and drivers of the decision to replace Brigham Young as governor and to escort his as-yet-unidentified successor with a large army expedition, see MacKinnon, “And the War Came: James Buchanan, The Utah Expedition, and the Decision to Intervene,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Winter 2008): 22-37. Scott’s order launching the expedition was in the form of a May 28, 1857, circular to the chiefs of the army’s staff bureaus. “The Utah Expedition,” U.S. Congress, House Ex. Doc. 71, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., Serial 956, 4-5, and LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen, eds., Mormon Resistance, 27-29. Notwithstanding the expectation of a 2,500-man force, by the time the expedition was on the plains, transfers and massive desertion had reduced it to fewer than 1,500 troops.

10. For a review of Harney’s command style and disciplinary record, see George Rollie Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001); MacKinnon, “Review Essay [Harney],” New Mexico Historical Review 76 (October 2001): 431-37.

11. L. U. Reavis, The Life and Military Services of General William Selby Harney (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., 1878), 277-79.

12. MacKinnon, ‘“Lonely Bones’: Leadership and Utah War Violence,” Journal of Mormon History 33 (Spring 2007): 121-78.

13. James Buchanan, Letter to Robert J. Walker, July 12, 1857, “Covode Investigation” [Covode was the Congressman who chaired the investigating committee], U.S. Congress, House Report 648, 36th Cong., 1st Sess., Serial 1071, 112-13. Buchanan guarded closely the text of this letter until the pressure of a congressional investigation forced its publication. For the clashes and recriminations between Walker and the administration over assigning Harney simultaneously to Kansas and Utah, see Adams, General William S. Harney, 159-81, and Pearl T. Ponce, “Pledges and Principles: Buchanan, Walker, and Kansas in 1857,” Kansas History 27 (Spring-Summer 2004): 51-91.

14. Through his aide, Scott took pains to explain to Harney that the delay in his orders lay not with Scott but rather with his civilian superiors (Floyd and Buchanan). Lieutenant Colonel George W. Lay, Letter to William S. Harney, June 26, 1857, Headquarters of the Army, Letters Sent (RG 108), National Archives.

15. MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 164-65.

16. Second Lieutenant George Dashiell Bayard, Letter to Samuel J. Bayard, March 3, 1857, quoted in Bayard, Life of George Dashiell Bayard, Late Captain, U.S.A., and Brigadier-General of Volunteers, Killed in the Battle of Fredricksburg, Dec. 1862 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1874), 115.

17. William S. Harney, Letter to John B. Floyd, August 8, 1857, Records of Adjutant General’s Office, Letters Received (RG 94), National Archives. Contrary to the impression Harney conveyed here, he had never been to Utah and had no experience in dealing with Mormon leaders.

18. Albert Sidney Johnston, Letter to William Preston, August 26, 1857, Wickliffe-Preston Papers, 63M349, University of Kentucky Library, Lexington.

19. Major Irvin McDowell, Letter to Albert Sidney Johnston, August 28, 1857, and War Department, General Orders No. 12, August 29, 1857.

20. Albert Sidney Johnston, Letter to Captain N.J. Eaton, October 11, 1858, quoted in William Preston Johnston, The Life of General Albert Sidney Johnston . . . (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1878), 232. The medical condition to which Johnston alludes here is unclear, although it may possibly have been related to a leg wound, sustained in Texas’s army during a duel fought with another general. Johnston’s August 26, 1857, comment to his brother-in-law that he was then “ready and more than willing” for assignment to either Utah or Kansas raises the questions of his candor in writing to Eaton thirteen months later to portray himself as a reluctant, ailing commander.

21. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 97-99.

22. Alexander, Letter “to the officers of the United States Army commanding forces en route to Utah,” October 8, 1857, in Hafen and Hafen, eds., Mormon Resistance, 66-69.

23. Albert Sidney Johnston, Letter to Irvin McDowell, October 18, 1857, “The Utah Expedition,” House Ex. Doc. 71, 35-38.

24. Edmund B. Alexander, Letter to Brigham Young, October 2, 1857, in ibid., 35. Alexander, writing to Young from within Utah’s northeast boundary, did not then know that Johnston had superseded Harney in command.

25. The two freshest accounts of the Lot Smith raid are found in the reminiscences of Smith himself and one of his Nauvoo Legion cavalrymen, James Parshall Terry, which are reprinted most recently in Hafen and Hafen, eds., Mormon Resistance, 220-46, and MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 347-49.

26. Edmund B. Alexander, Letter to Samuel Cooper, October 9, 1857, and Albert Sidney Johnston, Letter to Irvin McDowell, October 18, 1857, “The Utah Expedition,” House Ex. Doc. 71, 32, 37-38.

27. Irvin McDowell, Endorsement to John B. Floyd, December 10, 1857, written on Scott’s behalf on the dispatch of Albert Sidney Johnston to McDowell, October 18, 1857. When Johnston’s dispatch was copied and published at Congress’s request as part of “The Utah Expedition,” House Ex. Doc. 71, this endorsement was excluded and so remained unpublished until 2008. It may be found with a copy of Johnston’s dispatch in folder “Correspondence Regarding Utah Expedition,” (HR 35A-D123), House Committee on Military Affairs (RG 233), National Archives, and in MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 425.

28. Persifor Frazer Smith, Memorandum to John B. Floyd, November 24, 1857, Persifor Frazer Smith Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Brevet Lieutenant General Scott was the army’s only officer who held the substantive rank of major general. Twiggs, Wool, and Smith were brigadiers who were major generals only by brevet.

29. Remarkably by twenty-first-century standards, James Buchanan had made no public utterance about Utah or Mormon affairs until his written first annual message to Congress on December 8, 1857, the equivalent of today’s presidential State of the Union Address.

30. William S. Harney, Letter to James Buchanan, November 29, 1857, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

31. Buchanan’s first annual message to Congress and the related year-end 1857 annual reports of Floyd and Scott may be found in John Bassett Moore, ed., The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, 12 vols. (New York: Antiquarian Press Ltd., 1960), 10:129-63; John B. Floyd, “Annual Report,” December 5, 1857, U.S. Congress, Senate Ex. Doc 11, 35th Cong., 1st Sess., Serial 920, 6-9.

32. Headquarters of the Army, General Orders No. 1 and 4, January 8 and 16, 1858; copy in my files.

33. Winfield Scott, Telegram to John E. Wool, January 13, 1858, Wool Papers, State Library of New York, Albany, and Records of the Headquarters of the Army, Letters Sent (RG 108), National Archives.

34. John E. Wool, Telegram to Winfield Scott, January 15, 1858, Wool Papers, State Library of New York.

35. John E. Wool, Letter to Winfield Scott, January 15, 1858, in ibid. Wool’s reference to settling his “accounts” relates to his financial worries over the substantial sum still in dispute between him and the governmerit as a result of his tumultuous earlier assignment as commander of the Department of the Pacific.

36. Wool lacks a biographer, although a first-rate unpublished study of his life is Harwood P. Hinton, “The Public Career of John Ellis Wool” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1960). Hinton does not discuss the Scott telegram.

37. Irvin McDowell, Letter to Albert Sidney Johnston, January 19, 1858, Johnston Papers, Barrett Collection, Howard-Tilton Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, as discussed in Charles P. Roland, Albert Sidney Johnston: Soldier of Three Republics (1964; rpt., Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 203 note 69.

38. John E. Wool, Memorandum to Winfield Scott, January 23, 1858, Wool Papers, State Library of New York.

39. Lieutenant Colonel George W. Lay, Letter to Albert Sidney Johnston, January 23, 1858, “Report of the Secretary of War [1858],” U.S. Congress, House Ex. Doc. 2, 35th Cong., 2d Sess., Serial 998, 33. Lay was Scott’s aide de camp. This discussion of the Utah War’s little-known Pacific Coast dimension—significant, ambitious, but aborted—is adapted from MacKinnon, “Buchanan’s Thrust from the Pacific: The Utah War’s Ill-Fated Second Front,” Journal of Mormon History 34 (Fall 2008): 226-60.

40. Winfield Scott, Letter to John E. Wool, September 2, 1857, Wool Papers, State Library of New York.

41. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong: Young Man in New York (New York: Macmillan Co., 1952), 383, January 25, 1858. Murray Hoffman, Strong’s direct source, was a prominent judge on New York’s superior court. The massive bronze (not copper) equestrian statue of General George Washington had been installed in Manhattan’s Union Square in 1856 and remains there. In an attempt to save face, Scott later told Albert Sidney Johnston’s brother-in-law that the notion of a Pacific Coast journey was his with sanctioning by Buchanan and Floyd. Winfield Scott, Letter to William Preston, February 11, 1858, Wickliffe-Preston Papers, University of Kentucky Library.

42. Ironically, the Nauvoo Legion’s adjutant general, Brigadier General James Ferguson, came to a similar conclusion in January 1858 and complained in his year-end 1857 report to Brigham Young that disproportionate emphasis and resources were being placed on Mormon cavalry rather than infantry for the coming campaign in the mountains. Ferguson, Report, January 7, 1858, Nauvoo Legion Records, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

43. William S. Harney, Letter to James Buchanan, January 30, 1858, James Buchanan Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

44. George W. Lay, Letter to Albert Sidney Johnston, February 4, 1858, “Report of the Secretary of War [1858],” House Ex. Doc. 2, 33.

45. John M. Bernhisel, Letter to Brigham Young, December 17, 1857, LDS Church History Library. The date is incorrect. Based on internal evidence, it was written during the third week of February 1858, probably February 17. The allusion to Alaska appears in Brigham Young, Letter to John M. Bernhisel, March 5, 1858, LDS Church History Library. See differing interpretations of its meaning, MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 439-44.

46. P.G.T. Beauregard, Letter to John Slidell, February 9, 1858, holograph copy in Huntington Library, San Marino, California; typescript in Leonard J. Arlington Papers, Merrill-Cazier Library, Utah State University, Logan. Notwithstanding Beauregard’s plea for a colonelcy, he never rose above the rank of captain and brevet major in the U.S. Army but soon became a full general in the Confederate service.

47. Adams, General William S. Harney, 197-214.

48. “Correspondence between the Late Secretary of War and General Wool,” U.S. Congress, House Ex. Doc. 88, 35th Cong., 1st Sess.

49. “Personal Recollections of Charles R. Morehead” in William Elsey Connelly, War with Mexico, 1846-1847: Doniphan’s Expedition and the Conquest of New Mexico and California (Topeka, Kans.: n.p., 1907), 600-622. Without asserting a cause and effect linkage, one Washington reporter noted in the same dispatch plans for Pacific Coast reinforcements and the arrival of Morehead and Rupe: “Advices of the most reliable character have been received here from the Utah expedition.” “General Scott to Organize a Force on the Pacific Against the Mormons,” Dispatch, Baltimore Sun, January 24, 1858, rpt., New York Times, January 26, 1858, 1.

50. For officers’ apprehensions about threatened glory and promotions, see “General Scott to Organize a Force on the Pacific Against the Mormons,” New York Times, January 26, 1858, 1.

51. Winfield Scott, Letter to William Preston, February 11, 1858, Wickcliffe-Preston Papers, University of Kentucky Library. The army’s brevet system of officer rank was derived from that of the British Royal Army and was a form of honorific recognition for long service, valor, or merit in the absence of medals and decoration, which were not awarded in the American service until the Civil War. For most of their service, officers served in their substantive rank unless temporarily detailed to perform special duties, such as serving on a court-martial, in which case they could be assigned in their higher, brevet rank, be paid according to that rank, and were addressed accordingly. Under this system, Colonel Harney, commander of the Second U.S. Dragoons, had been assigned to command the Utah Expedition in his brevet brigadier’s rank, a grade with which he had been honored earlier by the nomination of the Secretary of War and the U.S. president with the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate in recognition of his valorous Mexican War service. Awarding brevet promotions was a way of extending recognition to deserving officers without doing violence to the extremely limited and rigid table of organization prescribed for the army by Congress. Notwithstanding Scott’s apparent prediction to Buchanan that Johnston would be brevetted twice during 1858, he was not nominated to major general. In fact, during the spring of 1858, Scott was unable to secure even a brevet majority for the Utah Expedition’s highly deserving Captain Randolph B. Marcy, Fifth U.S. Infantry, presumably because of the controversy over the Utah campaign. Scott’s own substantive rank was that of a major general, although he served in the position of general in chief as a brevet lieutenant general, a grade awarded to him after the Mexican War and only after a bitter, partisan political battle in Congress.

52. John B. Floyd, Letter to James Buchanan, February 8, 1858; copy in my files.

53. Winfield Scott, Letter to William Preston, February 11, 1858, Wickliffe-Preston Papers, University of Kentucky Library.

54. Michael Scott Van Wagenen, “Sam Houston and the Utah War,” Utah Historical Quarterly 76 (Summer 2008): 66-78. For the unpublished centerpiece of this Mormon lobbying effort, see Seth Blair, Letter to Sam Houston, December 1, 1857, “THE MORMON QUESTION, Interesting Letter from Great Salt Lake to Gen. Sam Houston,” New York Herald, March 2, 1858, p. 1, cols. 4-5. An example of Houston’s laudatory comments on Johnston’s courage but scathing assessment of his military capabilities, especially during the Civil War, appears in Sam Houston, Letter to Eber Worthing Cave, February 3, 1863, in The Personal Correspondence of Sam Houston, edited by Madge Thornall Roberts, 4 vols. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2001), 4:418-19.

55. Cooper’s letter of April 10 enclosed Floyd’s of April 3. Archivist Jessica Kratz, National Archives, email to MacKinnon, July 22, 2008; Albert Sidney Johnston, Letter to Samuel Cooper, May 17, 1858 (RG 98), National Archives. Consistent with the usages of substantive and brevet rank, Johnston immediately began to sign his Utah correspondence and orders as “Colonel, 2nd Cavalry, Bvt. Brig. Genl, Commanding” and was addressed by others as “General.”

56. Captain John H. Dickerson, Letter to W. A. Gordon, April 16, 1858, MSS 68, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

57. Wilford Hill LeCheminant, “A Crisis Averted? General Harney and the Change in Command of the Utah Expedition,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (Winter 1983): 30-45.

58. Fitz John Porter, “A Characteristic (Mormon) Conspiracy, (From Incidents of the Utah Expedition of 1859 to 1860, under Genl. A. S. Johnston),” holograph, 9-11, Box 53, Microfilm #25, Fitz John Porter Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Upon sensing danger, Rockwell’s dog was trained to rise up and silently lick his master’s face.

59. For specific examples of Young’s frequent and deep involvement in the minutiae of the Nauvoo Legion’s operations during the Utah War, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, Part 1, 11, 321, 340, 358-61.