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Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane first met on the plains of western Iowa in 1846. The Mormon prophet and the Philadelphia reformer would go on to exchange more than one hundred letters over the next three decades. This annotated collection of their correspondence reveals a great deal about these two remarkable men, while also providing crucial insight into nineteenth-century Mormonism and the historical moment in which the movement developed.

Thomas L. Kane (1822-1883), a crusader for antislavery, women's rights, and the downtrodden, rose to prominence in his day as the most ardent and persuasive defender of Mormons' religious liberty. Though not a Mormon, Kane sought to defend the much-reviled group from the \"Holy War\" waged against them by evangelical America. His courageous personal intervention averted a potentially catastrophic bloody conflict between federal troops and Mormon settlers in the now nearly forgotten Utah War of 1857-58. Drawing on extensive, newly available archives, this book is the first to tell the full story of Kane's extraordinary life. The book illuminates his powerful Philadelphia family, his personal life and eccentricities, his reform achievements, his place in Mormon history, and his career as a Civil War general. Further, the book revises previous understandings of nineteenth-century reform, showing how Kane and likeminded others fused Democratic Party ideology, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism.

Latter-day Saint Communalism The outlines of early Latter-day Saint communalism have long been understood by scholars.1 The Latter-day Saint gospel, with its emphasis on the restoration of the primitive Christian chinch of the New Testament, appealed to those who read in the Book of Acts that early Christians had \"all things common.\" In 1830, for instance, in the same year as the establishment of the Church of Christ by Joseph Smith, but before Sidney Rigdon had become acquainted with Latter-day Saint missionaries, Rigdon had stated at a gathering of the Mahoning Baptist Association that \"our pretension to follow the apostles in all their New Testament teachings, required a community of goods; that as they established this order in the model church at Jerusalem, we were bound to imitate their example. According to the editors of The Joseph Smith Papers, the core shift was to establish \"a new basis for economic reorganization that featured individual stewardships rather than common ownership. When an inquirer asked Joseph Smith in 1835 if \"a member of our church could move into this vicinity and purchase lands and enjoy his own possessions & property with out making it common Stock,\" Joseph replied that he himself owned a \"valuable farm\" and that we have no commonstock business among us, that every man enjoys his own property, or can if he is disposed, consecrate liberally or illiberally to the support of the poor & needy, or the building up of Zion.10 In 183 8, in a Church newspaper, Joseph Smith and others published a series of questions and answers.

In 1846, Oran Brownson, the older brother of the famed Catholic convert Orestes A. Brownson, penned a letter to his brother recounting a dream Orestes had shared with him much earlier. In the dream, Orestes, Oran, and a third brother, Daniel, were “traveling a road together.” “You first left the road then myself and it remains to be seen whether Daniel will turn out of the road (change his opinion),” Oran wrote. At approximately the same period in which Orestes converted to Catholicism “because no other church possessed proper authority,” Oran joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he believed that “proper authority rests among the Mormons.” Indeed, in an era characterized by denominational proliferation, democratization, and competition, Catholic and Mormon claims to divine authority proved appealing to some Americans, like the Brownsons, wearied by the diversity and disunity of the Protestant world. Oran cautioned Orestes to not trust polemical literature against Mormonism, but to “get your information from friends and not enemies.” Orestes could have repeated the same warning about Catholicism, given the number and intensity of nineteenth-century attacks on both Catholics and Mormons. Leaving mainstream Christianity to join the most despised religions in nineteenth-century America, the Brownson brothers embarked on spiritual quests that few contemporary Americans would have understood, much less approved.

In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphia social reformer, became the Mormons' self-appointed advocate to the nation and embarked on a wide-ranging publicity campaign to transform the image of the Latter-day Saints in the American mind. While most Americans considered Mormonism fraudulent and fanatical, Kane depicted the Saints as a persecuted minority driven from their homes in search of religious liberty. His descriptions of the suffering Saints, conducted through the popular press and pamphlets, resonated with deeply held ideals of religious tolerance and changing ideas about the nature of pain. As a result, sympathizing with the Saints became temporarily fashionable. Kane's effort abruptly ended, however, when Mormons publicly acknowledged their practice of polygamy in 1852, thus ceding their role as noble victims in a narrative of suffering. Kane's campaign to shape perceptions of Mormonism illuminates the connections between social reform, print culture, and minority religions in nineteenth-century America. While antebellum reform is typically described as emerging from evangelical religion and Whig Party politics, Kane represents social reformers allied with the Democratic Party, anti-evangelicalism, and romanticism. Mormonism's shifting image also reveals the struggles of nineteenth-century Americans to define the boundaries of religious freedom and practice. Marginal religious groups and their defenders used claims of victimhood to move to the rhetorical center of the nation's concerns. However, while Kane's emphasis on suffering briefly improved the Mormon image, it ironically reinforced the Latter-day Saints' drive for separatism that helped fuel the Mormon controversy for the rest of the century.

According to historians, following the economic experiments in the 1830s, Mormon attempts at communal living evolved into disparate cooperative efforts for the next several decades. According to Smith's revelation, Enoch and his people \"built a city that was called the City of Holiness, even Zion.\"

In 1846, Oran Brownson, the older brother of the famed Catholic convert Orestes A. Brownson, penned a letter to his brother recounting a dream Orestes had shared with him much earlier. In the dream, Orestes, Oran, and a third brother, Daniel, were “traveling a road together.” “You first left the road then myself and it remains to be seen whether Daniel will turn out of the road (change his opinion),” Oran wrote. At approximately the same period in which Orestes converted to Catholicism “because no other church possessed proper authority,” Oran joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because he believed that “proper authority rests among the Mormons.” Indeed, in an era characterized by denominational proliferation, democratization, and competition, Catholic and Mormon claims to divine authority proved appealing to some Americans, like the Brownsons, wearied by the diversity and disunity of the Protestant world. Oran cautioned Orestes to not trust polemical literature against Mormonism, but to “get your information from friends and not enemies.” Orestes could have repeated the same warning about Catholicism, given the number and intensity of nineteenth-century attacks on both Catholics and Mormons. Leaving mainstream Christianity to join the most despised religions in nineteenth-century America, the Brownson brothers embarked on spiritual quests that few contemporary Americans would have understood, much less approved.