By Christian K. Heimburger, Volume Editor
In November 1843, the venerable John C. Calhoun—former vice president of the United States, longtime member of Congress, and now a candidate for president—received an unsolicited letter at his plantation in present-day Clemson, South Carolina. The handwritten communication was sent from western Illinois by Joseph Smith, the famed prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who asked Calhoun: “What will be your rule of action, relative to us, as a people, should fortune favor your ascension to the Chief Magistracy?” The letter was passed down to Calhoun’s descendants until it was donated to the library at Clemson University. This fascinating piece of correspondence is one of fifty-three letters featured in The Joseph Smith Papers: Documents, Volume 13.
You may be asking yourself, “Why did Joseph Smith write to an aging states’ rights politician from the Deep South, and did he ever receive a response?” For nearly ten years, church leaders unsuccessfully petitioned state and federal authorities for redress for the persecutions and property losses the Latter-day Saints experienced in Missouri between 1833 and 1839. They appealed to state courts, sent formal appeals to Congress, and even met with President Martin Van Buren in the White House in 1839. And yet they received no promise of redress. “We have memorialized Congress,” lamented apostle John Taylor in October 1843, “but they have turned a deaf ear to our supplication and referred us again to the state, and justice of Missouri.”
In fall 1843, Joseph Smith and other Latter-day Saint leaders decided to change tack. In addition to drafting two memorials to Congress, they published appeals addressed to select citizens of the United States and wrote letters to five of the candidates seeking the presidency in 1844. In addition to Calhoun, the distinguished list of contenders included a former president, Martin Van Buren, two-time presidential hopeful Henry Clay, former Secretary of War Lewis Cass, and Van Buren’s former vice president, Richard M. Johnson.
Three of the candidates replied to Joseph Smith with terse, noncommittal responses, all of which are featured in Documents, Volume 13. Henry Clay was the first to answer. Smith favored the popular Whig candidate and had publicly declared himself a “Clay man” two months earlier. Clay informed Smith that while he sympathized with the Latter-day Saints’ “sufferings under injustice,” he could “enter into no engagements, make no promises, give no pledges, to any particular portion of the people of the U[nited] States.” Calhoun reiterated the Senate’s previous position when he replied to Smith in early December, telling him that the Latter-day Saints’ case did not “come within the Jurisdiction of the Federal government, which is one of limited and specific powers.” Calhoun had long been a proponent of the states’ rights doctrine: while serving as vice president in 1828, he had argued that a state had the power to nullify any act of the federal government that it considered unconstitutional. Calhoun’s ideas about states’ rights were shaped partly by the South’s commitment to protecting the institution of slavery. In contrast, Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints maintained that the state of Missouri had failed to protect their individual rights during the 1830s and that the federal government was responsible for protecting the liberty and rights of all the nation’s citizens. Democrat Lewis Cass was the last to reply. In his letter, he simply told Smith that he did not think the president had the power to award redress when the state of Missouri and Congress had rejected it.
Frustrated by the candidates’ disappointing answers, Joseph Smith instructed William W. Phelps to respond to Cass and Calhoun in late December and to “shew them the folly of keeping people out of their right and that there was power in government to redress wrongs.” The letter, which was published in the Times and Seasons, was full of anger and invective. The federal government’s unwillingness to award redress and the seemingly indifferent responses of the presidential candidates were some of the reasons why, in January 1844, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and others suggested that Joseph Smith himself run for president. See the forthcoming Documents, Volume 14 for more on his presidential campaign.