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Nauvoo Ill. April 30. 1845

Honorable Sir,

Suffer us, Sir, in behalf of a disfranchised and long afflicted people to prefer a few suggestions for your serious consideration in hope of a friendly and unequivocal response, at as early a period as may suit your convenience, and the extreme urgency of the case seems to demand.

It is not our resent design to detail the multiplied and aggravated wrongs that we have received in the midst of a nation that gave us birth. Some of us have long been loyal citizens of the state over which you have the honor to preside, while others claim citizenship in each of the states of this great confederacy. We say we are a disfranchised people. We are privately told by the highest authorities of this state, that it is neither prudent nor safe for us to vote at the polls; still we have continued to maintain our right to vote until the blood of our best men has been shed, both in Missouri, and the state of Illinois with impunity.

You are, doubtless, somewhat familiar with the history of our extermination from the state of Missouri, wherein scores of our bretheren were massacred, hundreds died through want and sickness, occasioned by their unparallelled sufferings; some millions of our property were confiscated or destroyed; and some fifteen thousand souls fled for their lives to the then hospitable and peaceful shores of Illinois; and that the state of Illinois granted to us a liberal charter, for the term of perpetual succession, under whose provisions private rights have become invested and the largest city in the state has grown up, numbering about 20,000 inhabitants.

But, Sir, the startling attitude recently assumed by the state of Illinois, forbids us to think that her designs are any less vindictive than those of Missouri, she has already used the military of the state, with the executive at their head, to coerce and surrender up our best men to unparallelled murder, and that too, under the most sacred pledges of protection and safety, as a salvo for such unearthly perfidy and guilt, she told us, through her highest Executive officer, that the laws should be magnified, and the murderers brought to justice; — ; but the blood of her innocent victims had not been wholly wiped from the floor of the awful arena, where the citizens of a sovreign state pounced upon two defenceless servants of God, our Prophet and Patriarch, before the senate of that state rescued one of the indicted actors in that mournful tragedy from the sherriff of Hancock? county, and gave him an honorable seat in her Hall of Legislation, and all others, who were indicted by the Grand Jury of Hancock county, for the murder of Generals Joseph and Hyrum Smith are suffered to roam at large, watching for further prey.

To crown the climax of those bloody deeds, the state has repealed all those chartered rights, by which we might have defended ourselves, lawfully, against aggressors, If we defend