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150 years ago
President Brigham Young and other Church leaders on April 24, 1845, addressed similar letters to U.S. President James K. Polk and the governors of the states except Missouri and Illinois. As recorded in History of the Church 7:404, the letters mentioned the murders the previous June of Joseph and Hyrum Smith and the persecution suffered by the Saints from mobs and the governments of Missouri and Illinois.
In the letter to President Polk, they wrote: "Will it be too much for us to ask you to convene a special session of congress and furnish us an asylum, where we can enjoy our rights of conscience and religion unmolested? Or will you in a special message to that body, when convened recommend a remonstrance against such unhallowed acts of oppression and expatriation as this people have continued to receive from the states of Missouri and Illinois?
" . . . And now, Honored Sir, having reached out our imploring hands to you, with deep solemnity, we would importune with you as a father, a friend, a patriot and the head of a mighty nation, by the Constitution of American Liberty, by the blood of our fathers who have fought for the independence of this Republic . . . that you will lend your immediate aid to quell the violence of mobocracy, and exert your influence to establish us as a people in our civil and religious rights where we now are, or in some part of the United States, or at some place remote therefrom, where we may colonize in peace and safety as soon as circumstances will permit."
Quote from the past
"The Church, established by divine inspiration to an unlearned youth, offers to the world the solution of all its social problems. It has stood the test of the first century successfully. In the midst of brilliant concepts of men in this twentieth century, who seek conscientiously for social reforms and who peer blindly into the future to read the destiny of man, the Church shines forth as the sun in the heavens around which other luminaries revolve as satellites of minor importance." - Elder David O. McKay, April 1930 general conference
