President Buchanan contemplated using Brigham Young to acquire northern Mexico, Cuba

ST. GEORGE — U.S. President James Buchanan contemplated using Brigham Young and the Mormons in a complex chain of events that would result in the acquisition by the United States of northern Mexico and Cuba, the president of the Mormon History Association said Saturday evening.

William P MacKinnon, ending his one-year term as the association head, delivered the traditional presidential address at the closing banquet for its annual conference in St. George over the weekend.

A Presbyterian by faith and a former General Motors executive by profession, MacKinnon is an expert on the Utah War. In 2008, he published "At Sword's Point," a documentary history of the events in 1857, when U.S. President James Buchanan, reacting to rumors from federal officials, sent an armed force to Utah to restore federal authority and replace Brigham Young as territorial governor.

In his address, MacKinnon also debunked a persistent bit of Mormon folklore pertaining to the march of the Army through Salt Lake City after a tenuous peace had been negotiated.

But it was the linkage of Buchanan's "Utah Expedition" with his designs on Mexico and Cuba to which MacKinnon devoted most of his address.

He presented recent research to show that late in the conflict with Brigham Young and the Mormons, Buchanan contemplated using soldiers already sent from the East and another army to be raised from the California coast to pressure the Mormons to flee to the region of Sonora, Mexico. With a "critical mass" of U.S. refugees thus in place, the United States could then annex the region, as had been done with Texas some 15 years earlier.

In a way that still remains a mystery, Buchanan's next step would be to acquire the Spanish colony of Cuba.

"How Buchanan could believe that a Mexican diaspora to Sonora, stimulated by pressure from a Utah Expedition reinforced from the Pacific Coast, would be willing to reaffiliate with the United States is an intriguing mystery," MacKinnon said. "Brigham Young had already been down that road, so to speak, after being driven out of Illinois" and being forced to settle in what was, at the time, Mexican territory in 1847.

"Ten years later, Young still chafed over the thought of an approaching Utah Expedition in the face of a history of LDS participation in the Mexican War through the U.S. Army's Mormon Battalion."

Even more elusive to understanding, MacKinnon said, are "the means by which Buchanan planned subsequently to spring from Mexico to his main objective: Cuba."