Recommendation from Quincy, Illinois, Branch, between 20 October and 1 November 1839
Source Note
, IL, branch, Recommendation, for JS, , Adams Co., IL, [between 20 Oct. and 1 Nov. 1839]; handwriting of ; signatures of and ; one page; Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington DC. Includes dockets.
One leaf, measuring 12½ × 7½ inches (32 × 19 cm). The document was folded in half and then trifolded—apparently for traveling.
In March 1840, collected all of the papers submitted to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in support of the church’s memorial to Congress and returned them to , Illinois. This recommendation was presumably included with the memorial and was still with that collection of documents when subsequent church delegations resubmitted the documents with additional petitions to the federal government. Congress apparently stored this recommendation with other documents it received in the 1840s relative to the church’s ongoing petitioning efforts. Those records were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration sometime after its creation in 1934. Since then, the National Archives and Records Administration has had continuous custody of the document.
Sometime between 20 October and 1 November 1839, , the clerk of a meeting of the in , Illinois, prepared this recommendation for JS. The timing and content of the recommendation strongly suggest that it was produced in support of JS’s trip to , where he and other appointed church members planned to petition the federal government for redress for property losses church members sustained in . According to the recommendation, the Quincy branch voted unanimously at a 20 October 1839 meeting to sustain JS as the “” of the church. Sloan then drafted the recommendation sometime before 1 November, when JS and his travel companions left Quincy for Washington DC. JS likely carried the recommendation—signed by Sloan and the meeting’s presiding elder, —with him to Washington and submitted it to Congress with other documents pertaining to the church’s petition for reparations.
It is not clear when members of the Quincybranch learned that JS would join the delegation that would petition the federal government, but the branch members were certainly aware of this plan by the time JS and the rest of the delegation arrived in Quincy on 30 October 1839. (See Historical Introductions to Statements, ca. 1 Nov. 1839–A and B; and Historian’s Office, JS History, Draft Notes, 29 Oct. 1839, 66.)