I went discredited, as an envoy, by an incident of personal conflict
with the Federal authorities; and I wish to relate that incident before
I proceed any farther. I must relate it soon, because it came up for
explanation in one of my first interviews with President Cleveland; and
I wish to relate it now, because it was so typical of the day and the
condition from which we had to save ourselves.
In the winter of 1885-6, the United States Marshals had been pursuing my
father from place to place with such determined persistence that it was
evident his capture was only a matter of time. We believed that if
he were arrested and tried before Chief Justice Zane--with District
Attorney Dickson and Assistant District Attorney Varian prosecuting--he
would be convicted on so many counts that he would be held in prison
indefinitely--that he might, in fact, end his days there. There was
the rumor of a boast, to this effect, made by Federal officers; and we
misunderstood them and their motives, in those days, sufficiently to
accept the unjust report as well-founded.
My father, as First Councillor of the Church, had proposed to President
Taylor that every man who was living in plural marriage should surrender
himself voluntarily to the court and plead: "I entered into this
covenant of celestial marriage with a personal conviction that it was an
order revealed by our Father in Heaven for the salvation of mankind. I
have kept my covenant in purity. I believed that no constitutional law
of the country could forbid this practice of a religious faith. As the
laws of Congress conflict with my sense of submission to the will of the
Lord, I now offer myself, here, for whatever judgment the courts of my
country may impose." He believed that such a course would vindicate the
sincerity of the men who had engaged in polygamy and defied the law
in an assumption of religious immunity; and he believed that the world
would pause to reconsider its judgment upon us, if it saw thousands
of men--the bankers, the farmers, the merchants, and all the religious
leaders of a civilized community--marching in a mass to perform such an
act of faith.
But President Taylor was not prepared for a movement that would have
recommended itself better to the daring genius of Brigham Young. Taylor
had given himself into the custody of the officers of the law once--in
Carthage, Illinois--with Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum Smith; and
Taylor had been wounded by the mob that broke into the jail and shot
the Smiths to death. This, perhaps, had cured him of any faith in the
protecting power of innocency. He decided against voluntary surrender;
and now that my father's liberty was so seriously threatened, he ordered
him to go either to Mexico or to the Sandwich Islands--his old
mission field--where he would be beyond the reach of the United States
authorities.
My father believed that if he left Utah, his recession might tend to
placate the government and soften the severity of the prosecutions of
the Mormons; and accordingly, on the night of February 12, 1886, he
boarded a west-bound Central Pacific train at Willard. The Federal
officers in some way learned of it; he was arrested, on the train, at
Humboldt Wells, Nevada, and brought back to Utah. Near Promontory he
fell from the steps of the moving car, at night, in the midst of an
alkali desert, and hurt himself seriously. He was recaptured and brought
to Salt Lake City on a stretcher, in a special car, guarded by a squad
of soldiers from Fort Douglas, with loaded muskets, and a captain with
a conspicuous sword. He was taken to Judge Zane's chambers and placed
under bonds of $25,000. Immediately two bench warrants were issued by a
United States Commissioner, and these were served upon him while he lay
on a mattress on the floor of Zane's office. Two more bonds of $10,000
each were given. He was then taken to his home.
Later--(President Taylor still insisting that he must not stand
trial)--he disappeared again, "on the underground," and his bonds
were declared forfeited. But in the meantime, while the grand jury was
hearing testimony against him, one of the beloved women of his family
was called for examination, and District Attorney Dickson asked her
some questions that deeply wounded her. She returned home weeping. My
brothers and I felt that the questions had been needlessly offensive,
and after an indignant discussion of the matter, I undertook to
remonstrate personally with Mr. Dickson.
If I had been as wise, then, as I sometimes think I am now, I should
have realized that a meeting between us was dangerous; that the feeling,
on our side at least, was too warm for calm remonstrances. And I should
not have taken with me a younger brother, about sixteen years old, with
all the hot-headedness of youth. Fortunately we did not go armed.
We sought Dickson in the evening, at the Continental Hotel--the old,
adobe Continental with its wide porches and its lawn trees--and we found
him in the lobby. I asked him to step out on the porch, where I might
speak with him in private. He came without a moment's hesitation. He was
a big, handsome, black-bearded man in the prime of his strength.
We had scarcely exchanged more than a few sentences formally, when my
brother drew back and struck him a smashing blow in the face. Dickson
grappled with me, a little blinded, and I called to the boy to
run--which he very wisely did. Dickson and I were at once surrounded,
and I was arrested.
Ordinarily the incident would have been trivial enough, but in the
alarmed state of the public mind it was magnified into an attempt on the
part of George Q. Cannon's sons to take the life of the United States
District Attorney. Indictments were found against my brother and myself,
and against a cousin who happened to be in another part of the hotel at
the time of the attack. Some weeks later, when the excitement had rather
died down, I went to the District Attorney's office and arranged with
his assistant, Mr. Varian, that the indictments against my brother (who
had escaped from Utah) and my cousin (who was wholly innocent) should
be quashed, and that I should plead guilty to a charge of assault and
battery. On this understanding, I appeared in court before Chief Justice
Zane.
But Mr. Varian, having consulted with Mr. Dickson, had learned that I
had not struck the blow--though, as the elder brother, I was morally
responsible for it--and he suggested to the court that sentence be
suspended. This, Justice Zane seemed prepared to do, but I objected. I
was a newspaper writer (as I explained), and I felt that if I criticized
the court thereafter for what I believed to be a harshness that amounted
to persecution, I could be silenced by the imposition of the suspended
sentence; and if I failed to criticize, I should be false to what I
considered my duty. I did not wish to be put in any such position; and I
said so.
Justice Zane had a respect for the constitution and the statutes that
amounted to a creed of infallibility. He was the most superbly rigid
pontiff of legal justice that I ever knew. A man of unspotted character,
a Puritan, of a sincerity that was afterwards accepted and admired
from end to end of Utah, he was determined to vindicate the essential
supremacy of the civil law over the ecclesiastical domination in
the territory; and every act of insubordination against that law was
resented and punished by him, unforgivingly. He promptly sentenced me to
three months in the County jail and a fine of $150.
My imprisonment was, of course, a farce. I was merely confined, most of
the time, in a room in the County Court House, where I lived and worked
as if I were in my home. But the sentence remained on my record as a
sufficient mark of my recalcitrance; and I knew that it would not aid me
in my appeal to Washington, where I intended to argue--as the first wise
concession needed of the Federal authorities--that Chief Justice
Zane should no longer be retained on the bench in Utah, but should
be succeeded by a man more gentle. He was the great figure among our
prosecutors; the others were District Attorney Dickson and the two
assistants, Mr. Varian and Mr. Riles. The square had only seemed to
be broken by the recent retirement of Mr. Dickson; the strength of his
purpose remained still in power, in the person of Judge Zane.
And let me say that whatever my opinion was of these men, at that time,
I recognize now that they were justified as officers of the law in
enforcing the law. If it had not been for them, the Mormon Church
would never have been brought to the point of abating one jot of its
pretensions. All four men, as their records have since proved, were much
superior to their positions as territorial officers. Utah's admiration
for Judge Zane was shown, upon the composition of our differences with
the nation, by the Mormon vote that placed him on the Supreme
Court bench. Indeed, it is one of the strange psychologies of this
reconciliation, that, as soon as peace was made, the strongest men of
both parties came into the warmest friendship; our fear and hatred
of our prosecutors changed to respect; and their opposition to our
indissoluble solidarity changed to regard when they saw us devoting our
strength to purposes of which they could approve. But now, in the midst
of our contentions, the aspect of splendor in their legal authority had
something baleful in it, for us; and we saw our own defiance set with a
halo of martyrdom and illumined by the radiance of a Church oppressed!
There was more than a glimmer of that radiance in my thoughts as I made
the railroad journey from Utah to the East. The Union Pacific Railway,
on which I rode, followed the route that the Mormons had taken in their
long trek from the Missouri; and I could look from my car window and
imagine them toiling across those endless plains--in their creaking
wagons, drawn by their oxen and lean farm cows--choked with dust, burned
by the sun of the prairies, their faces to the unknown dangers of an
unknown wilderness, and behind them the cool-roomed houses, the moist
fields, the tree-shaded streets, all the quiet and comfort of the
settled life of homekeeping happiness that they had left. My own mother
had come that road, a little girl of eight; and my mind was full of
pictures of her, at school in a wagon-box, singing hymns with her elders
around the camp fires at night, or kneeling with the mourners beside the
grave of an infant relative buried by the roadside. Our train crossed
the Loup Fork of the Platte almost within sight of the place where my
father, a lad of twenty, had led across the river at nightfall, had been
lost to his party, and had nearly perished, naked to the cold, before
he struggled back to the camp. I could see their little circle of wagons
drawn up at sunset against the menace of the Indians who snaked through
the long grass to kill. I could feel some of their despair, and my heart
lifted to their heroism. Never had such a migration been made by any
people with fewer of the concomitants of their civilization. Their arms
had been taken from them at Nauvoo; they had bartered their goods for
wagons and cattle to carry them; even the grain that they brought,
for food, had to be saved for seed. They felt themselves devoted to
destruction by the people with whose laws and institutions they had come
in conflict, and they went forth bravely, trusting in the power of the
God whom they were determined to worship according to their despised
belief.
Now they had built themselves new homes and meeting-houses in the
fertile "Valley;" and the civilization that they had left, having
covered the distance of their exile, was punishing them again for their
law-breaking fidelity to their faith. Surely they had suffered enough!
Surely it was evident that suffering only made them strong to resist!
Surely there must be somebody in power in Washington who could be
persuaded to see that, where force had always failed, there might be
some profit in employing gentleness!
This, at least, was the appeal which I had planned to make. And I had
decided to make it through Mr. Abraham S. Hewitt, then mayor of New
York City, who had been a friend of my father in Congress. He was not
in favor with the administration at Washington. He was personally
unfriendly to President Cleveland. I was a stranger to him. But I had
seen enough of him to know that he had the heart to hear a plea
on behalf of the Mormons, and the brain to help me carry that plea
diplomatically to President Cleveland.
When I arrived in New York I set about finding him without the aid of
any common friend. I did not try to reach him at his home, being aware
that he might resent an intrusion of public matters upon his private
leisure, and fearing to impair my own confidence by beginning with a
rebuff. I decided to see him in his office hours.
I cannot recall why I did not find him in the municipal buildings, but I
well remember going to and fro in the streets in search of him, feeling
at every step the huge city's absorption in its own press and hurry of
affairs, and seeing the troubles of Utah as distant as a foreign war.
It was with a very keen sense of discouragement that I took my place, at
last, in the long line of applicants waiting for a word with the man
who directed the municipal activities of this tremendous hive of eager
energy.
He was in the old Stewart building, on Broadway, near Park Place; and
he had his desk in what was, I think, a temporary office--an empty shop
used as an office--on the ground floor. There must have been fifty men
ahead of me, and they were the unemployed, as I remember it, besieging
him for work. They came to his desk, spoke, and passed with a rapidity
that was ominous. As I drew nearer, I watched him anxiously, and saw
the incessant, nervous, querulous activity of eyes, lips, hands, as
he dismissed each with a word or a scratch of the pen, and looked up
sharply at the next one.
"Well, young man," he greeted me, "what do you want?"
I replied: "I want a half hour of your time."
"Good God," he said, in a sort of reproachful indignation, "I couldn't
give it to the President of the United States."
I felt the crowd of applicants pressing behind me. I knew the man's
prodigious humanity. I knew that if I could only hold them back long
enough--"Mr. Hewitt," I said, "it's more important even than that. It's
to save a whole people from suffering--from destruction."
He may have thought me a maniac; or it may be that the desperation of
the moment sounded in my voice. He frowned intently up at me. "Who are
you?"
"I'm the son of your old friend in Congress, George Q. Cannon of Utah,"
I said. "My father's in exile. He and his people are threatened with
endless proscriptions. I want time to tell you."
His impatience had vanished. His eyes were steadily kind and interested.
"Can you come to the Board of Health, in an hour? As soon as I open the
meeting, I'll retire and listen to you."
I asked him for a card, to admit me to the meeting, having been
stopped that morning at many doors. He gave it, nodded, and flashed his
attention on the man behind me. I went out with the heady assurance that
my first move had succeeded; but I went, too, with the restrained pulse
of realizing that I had yet to join issue with the decisive event and do
it warily.
I do not remember where I found the Board of Health in session. I recall
only the dark, official board-room, the members at the table,
and--as the one small spot of light and interest to me--Mr. Hewitt's
white-bearded face, as an attendant opened the door to me, and the
Mayor, looking up alertly, nodded across the room, and waved his hand to
a chair.
As soon as he had opened the meeting, we withdrew together to a settee
in some remote corner, and I began to tell him, as quickly as I could,
the desperateness of the Mormon situation. "Yes," he said, "but why
can't your people obey the law?"
I explained what I have been trying to explain in this narrative--that
these people, following a Church which they believed to be guided by
God, and regarding themselves as objects of a religious persecution,
could not be brought by means of force to obey a law against conscience.
I explained that I was not pleading to save their pride but to spare
them useless suffering; their history showed that no proscription, short
of extermination outright, could overcome their resistance; but what
force could not accomplish, a little sensible diplomacy might hope to
effect. No first step could be made, by them, towards a composition of
their differences with the law so long as the law was administered
with a hostility that provoked hostility. But if we could obtain some
mitigation of the law's severity, the leaders of the Church were willing
to surrender themselves to the court--such of them as had not already
died of their privations or served their terms of imprisonment--and a
sense of gratitude for leniency would prepare the way for a recession
from their present attitude of unconquerable antagonism.
He listened gravely, knowing the situation from his own experience
in Congress, and checking off the items of my argument with a nod of
acceptance that came, often, before I had completed what I had to say.
He asked: "Do you know President Cleveland?"
I told him that I had seen the President several times but was not known
to him.
"Well," he said, "I may be able to help you indirectly. I don't care
for Cleveland, and I wouldn't ask him for a favor if I were sinking.
But tell me what plan you have in your mind, and I'll see if I can't aid
you--through friends."
I replied that I hoped to have some man appointed as Chief Justice in
Utah who should adopt a less rigorous way of adjudicating upon the cases
of polygamists; but that before he was selected--or at least before he
knew of his appointment--I wished to talk with him and convert him to
the idea that he could begin the solution of "the Mormon question"
by having the leaders of the community come into his court and accept
sentences that should not be inconsistent with the sovereignty of the
law but not unmerciful to the subjects of that sovereignty.
"The man you want," Mr. Hewitt said, "is here in New York--Elliot F.
Sandford. He's a referee of the Supreme Court of this state--a fine man,
great legal ability, courageous, of undoubted integrity. Come to me,
tomorrow. I'll introduce you to him."
It was the first time that I had even heard the name of Elliot F.
Sandford; and I had not the faintest notion of how best to approach him.
I did not find him in Mr. Hewitt's office, on the morrow; but the Mayor
had communicated with him, and now gave me a letter of introduction to
him; and I went alone to present it.
He received me in his outer office, with a manner full of kindliness but
non-committal. He glanced through my letter of introduction, and I tried
to read him while he did it. He was not on the surface. He was a tall,
dignified man, his hair turning gray--thoughtful, judicial--evidently
a man who was not quick to decide. He led me into his private room, and
sat down with the air of a lawyer who has been asked to take a case and
who wishes first to hear all the details of the action.
I began by describing the Mormon situation as I saw it in those days:
that the Mormons were growing more desperately determined in their
opposition, because they believed their prosecutors were persecuting
them; that the District Attorney and his assistants were harsh to the
point of heartlessness, and that Judge Zane (to us, then) acted like
a religious fanatic in his judicial office; that nearly every Federal
official in Utah had taken a tone of bigoted opposition to the people;
and that the law was detested and the government despised because of the
actions of Federal "carpet-baggers."
I was prejudiced, no doubt, and partisan in my account of the state of
affairs, but I did not exaggerate the facts as I saw them; I believed
what I said.
I did not really reach his sympathy until I spoke of the court system
in Utah--the open venire, the employment of "professional jurors"--the
legal doctrine of "segregation," under which a man might be separately
indicted for every day of his living in plural marriage--and the result
of all this: that the pursuit of defendants and the confiscation of
property had become less an enforcement of law than a profitable legal
industry.
After two hours of argument and examination, I ended with an appeal to
him to accept the opportunity to undertake a merciful assuagement of
our misery. After so many years of failure on the part of the Federal
authorities, he might have the distinction of calling into his court the
Mormon leaders who had been most long and vainly sought by the law;
and by sentencing them to a supportable punishment, he could begin the
composition of a conflict that had gone on for half a century.
He replied with reasons that expressed a kindly unwillingness to
undertake the work. It would mean the sacrifice of his professional
career in New York. He would be putting himself entirely outside the
progression of advancement. His friends, here, would never understand
why he had done it. The affairs of Utah had little interest for them.
I saw that he was not convinced. His wife had been waiting some minutes
in the outer office; he proposed that he should bring her in; and I
gathered from his manner, that he expected her to pronounce against his
accepting my solicitation, and so terminate our interview pleasantly,
with the aid of the feminine social grace.
Mrs. Sandford, when she entered, certainly looked the very lady to
do the thing with gentle skill. She was handsome, with an animated
expression, dark-eyed, dark-haired, charming in her costume, a woman
of the smiling world, but maturely sincere and unaffected. I took a
somewhat distracted impression of her greeting, and heard him begin to
explain my proposal to her, as one hears a "silent partner" formally
consulted by a man who has already made up his mind. But when I glanced
at her, seated, her manner had changed. She was listening as if she were
used to being consulted and knew the responsibilities of decision. She
had the abstracted eye of impersonal consideration--silent--with now and
then a slow, meditative glance at me.
Her first question seemed merely femininely curious as to the domestic
aspects of polygamy. How did the women endure it?
I repeated a conversation I had once had with Frances Willard, who had
said: "The woman's heart must ache in polygamy." To which I had made the
obvious reply: "Don't women's hearts ache all over the world? Is there
any condition of society in which women do not bear more than an equal
share of the suffering?"
Mrs. Sandford asked me pointedly whether I was living in polygamy?
No, I was not.
Did I believe in it?
I believed that those did who practiced it.
Why didn't I practice it?
Those who practiced it believed that it had been authorized by a divine
revelation. I had not received such a revelation. I did not expect to.
Our talk warmed into a very intimate discussion of the lives of the
Mormon people, but I supposed that she was moved only by a curiosity
to which I was accustomed--a curiosity that was not necessarily
sympathetic--the curiosity one might have about the domestic life of
a Mohammedan. I took advantage of her curiosity to lead up to an
explanation of how the proscription of polygamy was driving young
Mormons into the practice, instead of frightening them from it. And so
I arrived at another recountal of the miserable condition of persecution
and suffering which I had come to ask her husband help us relieve; and
I made my appeal again, to them both, with something of despair, because
of my failure with him, and perhaps with greater effect because of my
despair. She listened thoughtfully, her hands clasped.
It did not seem that I had reached her--until she turned to him, and
said unexpectedly "It seems to me that this is an opportunity--a larger
opportunity than any I see here--to do a great deal of good."
He did not appear as surprised as I was. He made some joking reference
to his income and asked her if she would be willing to live on a salary
of--How much was the salary of the Chief Justice of Utah?
I thought it was about $3,000 a year.
"Two hundred and fifty dollars a month," he said. "How many bonnets will
that buy?"
"No," she retorted, "you can't put the blame on my millinery bill. If
that's been the cause of your hesitation, I'll agree to dress as becomes
the wife of a poor but upright judge."
In such a happy spirit of good-natured raillery, my petition was
provisionally entertained, till I could see the President; and it is
one of the curiosities of experience, as I look back upon it now, that
a decision so momentous in the history of Utah owed its induction to the
wisdom of a woman and was confirmed with a domestic pleasantry.
I left them after we had arrived at the tacit understanding that if
President Cleveland should make the appointment, Mr. Sandford would
accept it with the end in view that I had proposed. I went to report
my progress, in a cipher telegram, to Salt Lake City, and I recall the
peculiarly mixed satisfaction with which I regarded my work, as I
walked the streets of New York after this interview. In all that city
of millions, I knew, there were few if any men who were the equal of my
father in the essentials of manhood; and yet, before he could enjoy the
liberties of which they were so lightly unconscious, he must endure the
shame of a prison. I was rejoicing because I was succeeding in getting
for him a sentence that should not be ruinous! I was pleased because a
prospective judge had been persuaded to be not too harsh to him!
It did not make me bitter. I realized that the peculiar faith which we
had accepted was responsible for our peculiar suffering. I saw that we
were working out our human destiny; and if that destiny was not of God,
but merely the issue of human impulsion, still our only prospect of
success would come of our bearing with experience patiently to make us
strong.
When I went back to Mr. Hewitt, to tell him of my success, I consulted
with him upon the best way of approaching Mr. Cleveland. And he was not
encouraging. In his opinion of the President, he had, as I could see,
the impatient resentment which a quick-minded, nervous, small-bodied
man has for the big, slow one whose mental operations are stubbornly
deliberate and leisurely. And he was obviously irritated by the
President's continual assumption that he was better than his party.
"He's honest," he said, "by right of original discovery of what honesty
is. No one can question his honesty. But as soon as he discovers a
better thing than he knew previously, he announces it as if it were
the discovery of a new planet. It may have been a commonplace for a
generation. That doesn't signify. He announces it with such ponderosity
that the world believes it's as prodigious as his sentences!"
As for my own mission: I would have to be persistent, patient,
and--lucky. "You'll have to be lucky, if you intend to persuade him to
acquire any information. He's been so successful in instructing mankind
that it's hard to get him to see he doesn't know all he ought to know
about a public question. But he's honest and he's courageous. If you can
convince him that your view is right, he'll carry but the conviction
in spite of everything. In fact he'll be all the better pleased if it
requires fearlessness and defiance of general sentimentality to carry it
out."
He gave me a letter to Mr. William C. Whitney, then Secretary of the
Navy, explaining my purpose in coming to Washington, and asking him to
obtain for me an interview with President Cleveland without using Mr.
Hewitt's name. Then he shook hands with me, and wished me success. "I
have the faith," he said, "that is without hope."
That expressed my own feeling. The faith that was without hope!