PROVO, Utah — He fought at Gettysburg. He was freed from jail by the U.S. Supreme Court. He was an abolitionist who helped the Underground Railroad. He was a world traveler.He also exchanged more than 120 letters with Brigham Young and remains well-known among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a "Friend of the Mormons" for his crucial role at two flashpoints of conflict between the church and the U.S. government.Fittingly, then, both Utah and the LDS Church continue to return the favors to Col. Thomas L. Kane.Information about Kane's endlessly intriguing life is still surfacing in a collection of papers by and about him at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University, which is owned by the church. For example, until BYU acquired some of the diaries of his wife, Elizabeth, and made them public, historians did not know the dates of Kane's two December 1857 visits to President James Buchanan at the White House on behalf of LDS Church President and Utah Territorial Gov. Brigham Young or what Kane reported to his family about the meetings."Would that President Buchanan or one of his cabinet members had kept a diary as Elizabeth Kane did," historian William P. MacKinnon said during a lecture Wednesday at BYU. Her diaries also placed many early LDS Church leaders at the Kane home in Philadelphia as they moved through the East or came and went to Europe on church missions. Elder George Q. Cannon was one of her favorites, said David J. Whittaker, curator of BYU's Thomas L. Kane and Elizabeth W. Kane Collection.Kane's adventurous life included studies in Europe, the publication of magazine articles in his fluent French, trips to Cuba and Panama, the Battle of Gettysburg and an interesting role as an abolistionist: His father got him a job as a district court clerk in Pennsylvania, but he resigned when the duties came to include returning more and more escaped slaves to the South. Kane's father had him jailed for contempt of court, but the U.S. Supreme Court ordered his release, according to the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War."He's a fascinating 19th-Century American for a lot of reasons," Whittaker said.Kane visited the Latter-day Saints in Iowa in 1846 as they staged for the exodus to Utah. Kane went to Washington, D.C., on their behalf and met with President James K. Polk and his secretaries of war and state. Kane arranged to have the church provide 500 men for the U.S. Army in its war with Mexico. The Mormon Battalion soothed federal concerns about the intentions of LDS Church leaders.MacKinnon's lecture focused on the Utah War more than a decade later. Young's term as governor expired in 1854 but he still held the post as Buchanan prepared for his inauguration in early 1857. Young asked Kane to intercede on his behalf with the new president. That effort failed. Buchanan instead decided to appoint a new governor and provide him an escort of 2,500 soldiers, nearly a third of the entire U.S. Army.Against the advice of his father and wife, Kane, who MacKinnon described as "sickly, overwhelmed and religiously struggling" after his brother's death, hurried to Utah in 1858 to help his friends, MacKinnon said. He arrived before the army but found Young unwilling to accept the new governor and in the midst of planning a guerrilla war against the army as 30,000 Latter-day Saints fled as refugees before the army's advance.Kane set out for home dejected, but then Young did an about face, MacKinnon said, and sent his son after Kane, who then went to Fort Bridger and persuaded the new governor to enter Utah without the army. The result, MacKinnon said, avoided the potential for additional bloodshed like that at the Mountain Meadows Massacre.Kane "prepared the way for the U-turn in Young's then-confrontational stance," MacKinnon said. "My opinion is Kane made an enormous, indispensable difference.""No one else could have done this, especially under such daunting circumstances," he added. "It was a virtuoso performance that prompted the New York Tribune's essentially anti-Mormon war correspondent Albert G. Brown Jr. to file a dispatch from Fort Bridger arguing that the nation owed a substantial debt of gratitude to a largely unknown Col. Kane."Utah continues to honor Kane with a statue in the Capitol rotunda. Kane County is named after him.MacKinnon is the 2008 recipient of the Thomas L. Kane Award, annually presented by the Mormon History Association to a person outside the LDS Church considered a friend to the church and a meaningful contributor to church history.BYU's Kane collection has grown to 79 boxes, or 73 linear feet in library lingo, and is one of more than 10 concentrations of Kane documents. Other collections are held by Yale, Stanford, the University of Utah and the LDS Church.The BYU collection "is enormously important and perhaps most vital," MacKinnon said. "I found BYU's holdings essential to grasping not only crucial aspects of what happened but also the why of what took place."He said BYU's collection contains enough information about Kane's activities with President Polk and the Mormons in 1846 and President Buchanan and church members in 1858 to reveal patterns about how a "complex" man operated.MacKinnon's lecture on Wednesday was the third in a series of seven about Kane that support a new exhibit of pieces from BYU's collection.The exhibit debuted at the end of the lecture and will be open until June. Among the 45 items in the exhibit are letters between Young and Kane.Whittaker, the Kane Collection curator, was heartened by the 135 — many of them BYU students — who attended the lecture in the library's auditorium."We've built a huge collection over 25 years," Whittaker said. "We hope these lectures and this exhibit will whet the appetites in serious, young students."The lecture series and exhibit come as Yale University Press prepared to release a new book about Kane in January: "Liberty to the Downtrodden: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer." The author, University of Southern Indiana professor Matthew Grow, will give the final lecture in the series on March 12.Whittaker delivered the first lecture, My Dear Friend: The Correspondence between Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane," in September.The other lectures will be presented by BYU professor Thomas G. Alexander on Dec. 10, Lowell "Ben" Bennion and Thomas Carter on Jan. 14 and retired BYU professor Edward A. Geary on Feb. 11. All of the lectures begin at 3 p.m. and are held in the Lee Library auditorium. The series is sponsored by the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at BYU and by BYU Studies.BYU religion professor Richard E. Bennett, who in October gave the second lecture, predicted more Kane documents will be discovered.MacKinnon agreed."The stuff from which will come an even better understanding of TLK and his contributions to the Utah War await us."
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