Letter from Brigham Young requesting asylum for Latter-day Saints up for auction

After the martyrdom of Jospeh Smith on June 27, 1844, Brigham Young and other leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints requested asylum for Latter-day Saints from New Hampshire governor John H. Steele. That letter went up for auction on RR Auction on Friday until April 12.

Young, Willard Richards, Newell K. Whitney and George Miller all signed the letter, which is dated April 24, 1845, and postmarked on May 27.

After Smith was martyred along with his brother Hyrum Smith, Latter-day Saints began their exodus to escape religious persecution.

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As part of their campaign, Young and the other leaders pled with Steele to seek asylum, per RR Auction. In the letter, they said that when the Saints were in Missouri, “scores of our brethren were massacred, hundreds died through want and sickness, occasioned by their unparalleled sufferings; some millions of our property were confiscated or destroyed.”

In the winter of 1839, Latter-day Saints moved from Missouri to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they hoped to find refuge. But after Smith was killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, and the charter of the city of Nauvoo was revoked in January 1845, the Saints were left without a place that offered freedom to live their religion without persecution.

In the April 1845 letter now for auction, Young and other church leaders ask Steele to, “furnish us an asylum, where we can enjoy our rights of conscience and religion unmolested.”

The letter was postmarked during the trial for nine men who were accused of participating in the murder of Smith, and who were acquitted after a short trial. There was never a trial for the murder of Joseph’s brother Hyrum Smith (although one was scheduled for June 24) and the letter was postmarked at a time when church members may have sensed the state of Illinois was no longer safe. The postscript on the April 1845 letter said they had to postmark the letter at New York because if it were postmarked at Nauvoo, there was a chance it might be intercepted.

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Steele responded to the letter and said that while he denounced what happened to Joseph and Hyrum Smith, the Saints’ plea for asylum was rejected, per RR Auction. Brigham Young said in “Millennial Star” published on Oct. 4, 1862, that even though they had written all governors of states and territories in the Union to request asylum—only five replied and all were rejections. Young had also written President James A. Polk on August 9, 1862, saying he and the Latter-day Saints still supported the U.S. Constitution, but needed to leave because of the treatment from governors.

In Steele’s rejection letter, he said the saints had no alternative except to move to a different place or abandon their “peculiar faith.” Two years after Young et al. sent this letter, church members began trekking out west, first arriving in Utah on July 24, 1847.

The letter, which is available with photographs and a partial transcript on RR Auction, has an estimated value of at least $50,000 and a bidding window from March 17 to April 12.