The Suffering Saints: Thomas L. Kane, Democratic Reform, and the Mormon Question in Antebellum America

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.