1850-1860, After Saints in the West: 4 Families of 11 First Converts

These 4 extended families are represented by:

1.      Hepworth

2.      Babbitt

3.      Germer

4.      Catmull/Chandler

Brother Brigham refused the strenuous invitation of Samuel Brannan to take the Saints to California, where the climate and soil was so much more inviting than the Great Salt Lake Basin and the Intermountain West.  The Brooklyn Ship Saints found California to be very enticing in many ways, calling it the land of “perpetual spring.”  Brother Brigham had famously stated that the Saints needed just ten years in the relative isolation of the unpopulated intermountain west, that under appreciated territory of Deseret, away from the potential pressures and distresses imposed by the outside world, to get well situated.  Those ten years ended in 1860. 

August 1, 1852 – Brigham Young said:

These are happy days to the Saints, and we should rejoice in them; they are the best days we ever saw; and in the midst of the sorrows and afflictions of this life, its trials and temptations, the buffet teams of Satan, the weakness of the flesh, and the power of death which is sown in it, there is no necessity for any mortal man to live a single day without rejoicing, and being filled with gladness.  I allude to the Saints, who have been acquainted with the laws of the new covenant.  There is no necessity of one of these passing a day without enjoying all the blessings his capacities are capable of receiving.  Yet it is necessary that we should be tried, tempted, and buffeted, to make us feel the weaknesses of this mortal flesh.  We all feel them; our systems are full of them, from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet; still, in the midst of all these weaknesses and frailties of human nature, it is the privilege of every person who has come to the knowledge of the truth, to rejoice in God, the rock of his salvation, all the day long.  We rejoice because the Lord is ours, because we are sown in weakness for the express purpose of attaining to greater power and perfection.  In everything the Saints may rejoice – in persecution, because it is necessary to purge them, and prepare the wicked for their doom; in sickness and in pain, though they are hard to bear, because we are thereby made acquainted with pain, with sorrow, and with every affliction that mortals can endure, for by contrast all things are demonstrated to our senses.  We have reason to rejoice exceedingly that faith is in the world, that the Lord reigns, and does His pleasure among the inhabitants of the earth.  Do you ask if I rejoice because the Devil has the advantage over the inhabitants of the earth, and has afflicted mankind?  I most assuredly answer in the affirmative; I rejoice in this as much as anything else.  I rejoice because I am afflicted.  I rejoice because I am poor.  I rejoice because I am cast down.  Why?  Because I shall be lifted up again.  I rejoice that I am poor, because I shall be made rich; that I am afflicted, because I shall be comforted, and prepared to enjoy the felicity of perfect happiness, for it is impossible to properly appreciate happiness, except by enduring the opposite.  (JD, Volume 1, page 358-359)

Two more states joined the union of the U.S.  Minnesota on May 11, 1858, and Oregon on, Feb. 14, 1859, making 33 as of 1860. 

1851
Feb. 18: A Boston crowd rescues Shadrack, a fugitive slave, from court custody.

June 2: Maine adopts a law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages, leading future prohibition statutes to be called Maine laws.

1852
Mar. 20: Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin, which sells 300,000 copies in a year and a million copies in 16 months. When Stowe met President Lincoln at the White House, he reportedly asked her: "Is this the little woman whose book made such a great war?"

1853
Dec. 30: Gadsden Purchase. Mexico sells the United States 29,640 square miles of territory south of the Gila River (in what is now southern Arizona and New Mexico) for $10 million.

1854
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison publicly burns a copy of the Constitution, calling it "a covenant with death and an agreement with Hell."

Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, which is based on his experiences living beside Walden Pond near Concord, Mass. From July 1845 to September 1847. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation," he writes.

Jan. 23: Sen. Stephen Douglas introduces the Kansas Nebraska Act, which repeals the Missouri Compromises and opens Kansas and Nebraska to white settlement.

Feb. 4: Alvan Bovay, a Ripon, Wisc., attorney, proposes that opponents of slavery organize a new political party, the Republican party.

Mar. 31: Commodore Matthew C. Perry negotiates the Treaty of Kanagawa, opening up Japan to the West.

Apr. 26: Eli Thayer founds the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society to encourage opponents of slavery to move to Kansas.

June 2: In Boston, the U.S. government returns Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, to slavery.

Oct. 18: Ostend Manifesto. American ministers James Buchanan, John Y. Mason, and Pierre Soulé, meeting in Belgium, urge the United States to seize Cuba militarily if Spain refuses to sell the island. Many Northerners regarded this as a plot to extend slavery.

1855
Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass.

Abraham Lincoln writes: "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Mar. 30: Pro-slavery forces win the territorial elections in Kansas. Some 6000 votes are cast even though only 2000 voters are registered, many by pro-slavery "border ruffians" from Missouri. The pro-slavery government passes laws imposing the death penalty for aiding a fugitive slave and two years hard labor for questioning the legality of slavery. Antislavery forces respond by setting up an opposing government in Topeka.

1856
May 19: Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachuetts denounces "The Crime Against Kansas," which he describes as the rape of a virgin territory by pro-slavery forces. In his speech, Sumner accuses a South Carolina Senator of taking "the harlot Slavery" for his mistress."

May 21: The "Sack of Lawrence." Pro-slavery forces in Kansas burn a hotel and other buildings in Lawrence, Kansas.

May 22: Sen. Butler's nephew, Representative Preston Brooks, beats Sen. Sumner with a cane, leaving him disabled for three years.

May 25: In reprisal for the "Sack of Lawrence" and the attack on Sumner, John Brown and six companions murder five pro-slavery men at Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. A war of reprisals left 200 dead in "Bleeding Kansas."

1857
Mar. 6: In the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, the Supreme Court rules that the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights were not intended to apply to African Americans and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The decision also denied Congress and territorial legislatures the right to exclude slavery from the western territories.

Mar. 23: Elisha Otis installs the first passenger elevator in a New York department store.

Aug. 24: The Financial Panic of 1857 begins; 4,932 business fail by year's end.

1858
June 16: Abraham Lincoln accepts the Republican nomination for US Senate with the famous phrase, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."

Aug. 21 to Oct. 15: Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, candidates for the US Senate from Illinois, hold seven debates. The Democratic majority in the Illinois legislature reelected Douglas to the Senate.

Oct. 25: Senator William Seward of New York declares that there is an "irrepressible conflict" between the free North and the slave South.

1859
Daniel Decatur Emmett, a Northerner from Ohio, composes Dixie for a New York minstrel show.

May 12: A commercial convention in Vicksburg, Miss., calls for the African slave trade to be reopened.

Aug. 27: "Colonel" Edwin L. Drake strikes oil at Titusville, Pa. This was the first deliberate attempt to drill for oil underground.

Oct. 16: John Brown and some 21 followers seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. He is taken prisoner two days later, US Marines, led by Col. Robert E. Lee.

Oct. 31: Refusing to plead insanity as a defense, John Brown is put on trial and is convicted of treason, criminal conspiracy, and murder. He is hanged Dec. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson hails Brown as a "new saint" who "will make the gallows glorious like the cross."

1860
US population: 31,443,321.

Publisher Erastus Beadle issues the first dime novels, which actually sell for a nickel.

Apr. 3: The Pony Express inaugurates overland male service between St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento, Calif.

Apr. 23: Southern delegates walk out of the Democratic National Convention in Charleston, S.C. The convention adjourns without nominating a presidential candidate.

June 18-23: Northern Democrats, convening in Baltimore, nominate Stephen Douglas for the presidency. On June 28, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge as their presidential candidate.

Nov. 6: Abraham Lincoln tops a four-candidate field to be elected president. Although he received less than 40 percent of the vote, and no votes in the South, he won an overwhelming Electoral College victory.

Dec. 20: South Carolina, voting 169-0, secedes from the Union.