| 412 be tried in the county where the offense was committed, and the inhabitants of the county, both magistrates and people, were combined, with the exception of a few; justice cannot be expected. At this day your petitioners do not know of a solitary family belonging to our church but what have been violently expelled from Jackson County by the inhabitants thereof.
"Your petitioners have, not gone into detail with an account of their individual sufferings from death and bruised bodies and the universal distress which prevails at this day, in a greater or less degree, throughout our whole body. Not only because those sacred rights guaranteed to every religious sect have been publicly invaded, in open hostility to the spirit and genius of free government, but such of their houses as have not been burnt, their lands and most of the products of the labor of their hands for the last year have been wrested from them by a band of outlaws, congregated in Jackson County on the western frontiers of the United States, within about thirty miles of the United States' military post at Fort Leavenworth, on the Missouri River.
"Your petitioners say that they do not enter a minute detail of the sufferings in this petition, lest they should weary the patience of the venerable chief whose arduous duties they know are great, and daily accumulating. We only hope to show him that [in] this unprecedented emergency in the history of our country-that the magistracy thereof is set at defiance, and justice checked in open violation of its laws, and that we, your petitioners, who are almost wholly native born citizens of these United States, of whom they purchased their lands in Jackson County, Missouri, with intent to cultivate the same as peaceable citizens, are now forced from them, and dwelling in the counties of Clay, Ray, and Lafayette in the State of Missouri, without permanent homes, and suffering all the privations which must necessarily result from such inhuman treatment. Under these sufferings your petitioners petitioned the Governor of this State, in December last, in answer to which, we received the following letter."
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