Other than among readers of Mormon and Utah history, and the citizens of Kane, Pennsylvania, the name of Thomas L. Kane is unlikely to be familiar. Then too, the 1858 Mormon War, for which Kane won a measure of fame among his contemporaries for having averted, suffers today the fate of any bloodless conflict on the eve of the Civil War. Not only does it lack the sanguinary appeal of the war that lay so near in the future, but it also had almost nothing to do with it, which frustrates the natural tendency of historians to see virtually everything in the antebellum period as prologue to Secession and Fort Sumter. As Matthew J. Grow capably demonstrates in “Liberty to the Downtrodden”: Thomas L. Kane, Romantic Reformer, there is more to this period of American history than meets the eye, and there has always been more to America's heroes than their heroism.

The diminutive and sickly Kane (1822–1883) was full of contradictions. Born to a wealthy, well-connected and conventionally religious Philadelphia family, Kane was a religious skeptic for much of his life. He was nonetheless drawn to the Mormons (though he never converted) from the days of his youth and served for many years as a friend and political advisor to Brigham Young. He publicly devoted himself to defending Mormon rights and religious liberties even as he was scandalized by revelations of polygamy and rejected their theological claims outright. He favored a non-violent end to slavery even as he sympathized with slave owners. When the Civil War broke out, he recruited the Kane Rifle Regiment from among the rough frontiersmen of the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania and led his soldiers in battle against the Confederacy with courage and distinction. Yet he delighted in Southern plantation culture, opposed any hint of integration, and had a horror of miscegenation.

In this detailed and solidly documented book, Grow has persuasively reconciled the paradoxical elements of Kane's religious, political, and personal life under the rubric of “Romantic Reformer.” Enamored of the reforming zeal that was most often rooted in evangelicalism, Kane despised the sanctimonious strivings of many reformers, even as he quite actively supported many of their goals: female education (his wife, Elizabeth with his strong encouragement became one of the first women to train as a physician in the United States), early childhood education, abolition, and, in so far as it was possible, an end to all human suffering. Yet his self-perception was as much Ivanhoe as Ralph Waldo Emerson. He saw himself in the image of the romantic hero, and he valued courage, honor, and self-sacrifice even more than intellectual consistency or wisdom. In spite of his bodily weakness, he undertook repeated, arduous expeditions into the West and longed to follow his brother, Elisha, into arctic exploration. When, shortly before the Civil War, the tense relations between the Mormons and the U.S. government threatened to boil over into a frontier war, Kane made a dangerous, mid-winter journey—at his own expense—to the Great Salt Lake to negotiate a resolution to the conflict and to persuade Brigham Young to accept the hard drinking Alfred Cumming as territorial governor of Utah. It was the high point of his life when all of his best qualities—peacemaking, courage, resolute toughness—came together to serve a singular cause. Later events—even his service in the Civil War—were marred by some of his less salubrious qualities, especially his prickly sense of honor, which led him to challenge his commanding officer, Charles Biddle, to a duel.

“Liberty to the Downtrodden” accomplishes something Thomas Kane failed to do. It rescues him from obscurity and irrelevance. Grow suggests that Kane was representative of a type: the mid-nineteenth-century reformer and humanitarian who craved fame and personal glory as much as he sought justice for all. Yet the careful portrait Grow has provided is of an individual, tortured at times by his need for recognition even as he mastered the art of backstage politics and did his best work from a position of obscurity. This might have been for the best, for the Thomas Kane who emerges from Grow's study is not particularly likeable. Though he was certainly a romantic and devoted much of his life to the cause of reform, these two currents of American life did not mix well in Kane, and the romantic reformer proved to be a paradoxical and, for much of his life, unhappy figure. Thankfully, he need not remain an obscure one.