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Rigdon, Sidney. An appeal to the American people: being an account of the persecutions of the Church of Latter Day Saints; and of the barbarities inflicted on them by the inhabitants of the state of Missouri. By authority of said church. Second edition, revised. Cincinnati, Printed by Shepard & Stearns, 1840.
vi, [7]–60 p. 19 cm.

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Appeal to the American People was a quasi-official publication of the Church, written by Sidney Rigdon. It was first published in January 1840 by Orson Hyde and Rigdon’s son-in-law, George W. Robinson. The second edition, printed in an edition of 2000 a few months after the first, was published as a fund-raiser to assist the impecunious Orson Hyde on his mission to the Holy Land. Contrasted with John P. Greene’s documentary Facts Relative to the Expulsion and Parley Pratt’s more personal Late Persecution, Rigdon’s Appeal to the American People tends to be propagandistic, and at places it is clearly overdrawn. It does, however, print some first-hand accounts not in either Greene’s Facts or Pratt’s Late Persecution. The only significant difference between the two editions is Hyde’s preface added to the second edition describing the genesis and purpose of his mission to Jerusalem.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley and Chad J. Flake, A Mormon Fifty: an exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library in conjunction with the annual conference of the Mormon History Association. (Provo, Utah, Friends of the Brigham Young University Library, 1984). Item 17, p. [15–16].

Used by permission of the authors.