Higbee, Elias, and Robert Blashel Thompson.  “Latter-day Saints”, alias Mormons.  The petition of the Latter-day Saints, commonly known as Mormons, stating that they have purchased lands of the General Government, lying in the state of Missouri, from which they have been driven with force by the constituted authorities of the state, and prevented from occupying the same; and have suffered other wrongs, for which they pray Congress to provide a remedy.  December 21, 1840.  Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. 26th Congress, 2d Session. Doc. No. 22. Ho. of Reps. [Signed and dated at end:] Elias Higbee, Robt. B. Thompson. Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois, November 28, 1840.  [Washington, 1840?]
13 pp. 25 cm.

View Document

At the conference of the Saints in Nauvoo, October 5, 1840, John C. Bennett, who had been in the Church less than two months, delivered an impassioned speech on the mistreatment of the Mormons in Missouri and urged the conference to take further steps to obtain redress.  In response the conference delegated Elias Higbee and Robert B. Thompson to initiate a second appeal to the federal government.  Higbee and Thompson were expected choices: two days before, Thompson had been appointed Church clerk, and the year before, Higbee had led the first attempt to obtain federal assistance.

Both Higbee and Joseph Smith must have known that a second appeal would be fruitless.  Higbee had been on the scene while the Senate Judiciary Committee debated the first petition, and he knew the doctrine of states’ rights was insurmountable.  Perhaps they felt that even a fruitless effort might generate some favorable publicity for the Saints.

Higbee and Thompson completed their petition on November 28, 1840.  Twenty–three days later, John T. Stuart, the representative from Springfield, Illinois, presented it to the House of Representatives, which referred it to the House Judiciary Committee and ordered it printed.  There it died.

Generally the Higbee–Thompson petition is the same as the one submitted a year earlier.  It incorporates some expositional improvements and one substantive change: the Mormon losses in Jackson, estimated at $175,000 in the first, are reduced to $120,000 in the second.  The bulk of the petition rehearses the Mormons’ difficulties in the various Missouri counties, points out that they have exhausted all possibilities within the state, and declares that no redress is possible “unless it be awarded by the Congress of the United States.”

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church.  Volume One, 1830-1847. (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, [1997]).  Item 94, p. 143–44.

Used by permission of the author and the Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University