Nauvoo City Council, Preamble and Resolutions, , Hancock Co., IL, 13 Jan. 1845. Version copied [ca. 13 Jan. 1845] in Nauvoo City Council Minute Book, pp. 231–233; handwriting of ; CHL.
cannot now be foreseen. We deprecate such evils and calamities because we desire the good of all mankind; as the gratuitous labors of the greater portion of our Citizens in spreading truth throughout the world under much poverty and suffering, abundantly prove.
As for us, our course is fixed, and while we are peaceable and loyal to the constitution and laws of our country, and are ever willing to join hands with the honest, virtuous, and patriotic in suppressing crime and punishing criminals, we will leave our enemies to judge, whether it would not be better to make one universal burying ground, before we suffer ourselves to be driven from our hard earned and lawful homes, by such high handed oppression, and it may yet become a question to be decided by the community, whether the Mormons will, after having witnessed their best men murdered without redress, quietly and patiently, suffer their enemies to wrench from them the last shreds of their constitutional rights; and whether they will not make their one great Sepulchre, rather than be the humble devotees at the shrine of mobocracy. But for the satisfaction of all concerned, we reiterate in the following resolutions, sentiments that we have always expressed in all <places as> occasions demanded:
Resolved, that the greater part of the thefts which have been complained of, are not in our opinion, true, in fact, but have been trumped up by inimical persons, in order to cover their aggressive doings, with plausibility, and entice honest and unwary citizens to unite with them in the same uncompromising hostility against this people.
Resolved. That we defy the world to substantiate a single instance, where we have concealed criminals, or screened them from justice; but, on the contrary, always have been, and now are, extremely anxious that they should be ferretted out and brought to justice; and to this end would esteem it a favor, that if any person should lose property or have good and sufficient reason to suspect any place of containing apparatus for making bogus or counterfeit money, that such person would follow up, trace out, and make diligent search, for all such property and apparatus, and if they can trace it into this , we pledge ourselves to assist them legally, to the extent of our abilities in so laudable an undertaking. [p. 232]