Footnotes
An account of an April 1840 JS discourse states that JS met with Van Buren at the President’s House over two successive days, whereas according to this letter to Hyrum Smith—the earliest extant account of the meeting—and a March 1840 discourse, the parties met at the President’s House only once. All three of these accounts, however, reported the same sentiment in Van Buren’s response. (Discourse, 7 Apr. 1840; Discourse, 1 Mar. 1840.)
See Allgor, Parlor Politics, 76–79, 232.
Allgor, Catherine. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Reynolds, My Own Times, 575. According to Lucy Mack Smith’s account of this meeting between JS, Higbee, and Van Buren, the parlor in which these men met was filled with several other visitors. (Lucy Mack Smith, History, 1844–1845, bk. 17, [12].)
Reynolds, John. My Own Times: Embracing Also, the History of My Life. Belleville, IL: B. H. Perryman and H. L. Davison, 1855.
Presidents rarely issued executive orders during this period. Van Buren’s seven predecessors in office had issued a combined total of thirty executive orders over forty-three years. Van Buren issued ten executive orders during his term as president. (Peters and Woolley, “Executive Orders,” in American Presidency Project.)
Peters, Gerhard, and John T. Woolley. “Executive Orders.” In The American Presidency Project, 1999–. Hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017. www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php.
Silbey, Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, chaps. 3–4.
Silbey, Joel H. Martin Van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
A report of JS’s discourse at an April 1840 general conference of the church states that JS and Higbee were seeking Van Buren’s assistance with their plan to petition Congress and makes no mention of a possible executive order. (Discourse, 7 Apr. 1840.)
Letter to Seymour Brunson and Nauvoo High Council, 7 Dec. 1839; Letter from Robert D. Foster, 24 Dec. 1839. At this time, the president’s annual message to Congress (later known as the State of the Union address) was not delivered as a speech but instead was sent to Congress as a letter. (Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., Appendix, 1–7.)
The Congressional Globe, Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Congress. Vol. 8. Washington DC: Blair and Rives, 1840.
According to this letter and others that JS, Rigdon, and Higbee wrote to Commerce during the ensuing months, the delegation was constantly concerned about insufficient funds during their travels. (Letter from Jacob W. Jenks, 31 Dec. 1839; Letter from Elias Higbee, 20 Feb. 1840–B; Letter from Sidney Rigdon, 3 Apr. 1840.)
This campaign to have influential men write to Congress was apparently an extension of the petitioning plan Rigdon set forth in April 1839. (Letter from Sidney Rigdon, 10 Apr. 1839.)
Coray, Autobiographical Sketch, 17, 19.
Coray, Howard. Autobiographical Sketch, after 1883. Howard Coray, Papers, ca. 1840–1941. Photocopy. CHL. MS 2043, fd. 1.
Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., 5 Dec. 1839, 6. The chair pro tem is a placeholder, in this case a person who acted as Speaker of the House of Representatives until the legislative body was fully organized and ready to elect one of its members to that position.
Journal, of the House of Representatives, of the State of Missouri, at the First Session of the Tenth General Assembly, Begun and Held at the City of Jefferson, on Monday, the Nineteenth Day of November, in the Year of Our Lord, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty-Eight. Jefferson City, MO: Calvin Gunn, 1839.
This “warm feeling” pertained to the controversy that surrounded the seating of delegates from New Jersey, about which several passionate speeches were made by delegates supporting one side of the conflict or the other. (See Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., 1st Sess., pp. 17–20.)
The Congressional Globe, Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Congress. Vol. 8. Washington DC: Blair and Rives, 1840.
See Revelation, 16–17 Dec. 1833 [D&C 101:89].
The four men representing Missouri in the Twenty-Sixth Congress were Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Senator Lewis F. Linn, Representative John Jameson, and Representative John Miller. (Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 120, 646, 1324, 1452, 1586.)
Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–2005, the Continental Congress, September 5, 1774, to October 21, 1788, and the Congress of the United States, from the First through the One Hundred Eighth Congresses, March 4, 1789, to January 3, 2005, inclusive. Edited by Andrew R. Dodge and Betty K. Koed. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005.
Wheeling, Virginia (later in West Virginia), was a town through which the National Road passed. (Raitz, National Road, 7, 113–114.)
Raitz, Karl. The National Road. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Decades later, Robert D. Foster gave a detailed account of this incident to Joseph Smith III, but because Foster was not present during the event, his memory likely came from accounts he heard from JS and Higbee. (Robert D. Foster, Loda, IL, to Joseph Smith III, 14 Feb. 1874, in Saints’ Herald, 14 Apr. 1888, 225–226.)
Saints’ Herald. Independence, MO. 1860–.