This article is to mark this week's Feb. 12, celebration of Abraham Lincoln's two-hundredth birthday. Visit the United States Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission website for details of celebrations in your area.

Did Abraham Lincoln ever meet President Joseph Smith, Jr? If so, neither man recorded it. However, their parallel histories suggest that such an encounter may well have taken place in early day Illinois. In 1838, the year after Abraham Lincoln began practicing law in Springfield, Illinois the first of the Latter Day Saints moved into that state, arriving at Quincy, across the Mississippi River from Missouri where strife and conflict forced their removal. Two months later they purchased a swampy, defunct town site known as Commerce, renamed it Nauvoo, and commenced building a community for those who would follow. Records show that Joseph Smith arrived in Nauvoo in early or mid-May, 1839 to reunite with the Church followers there.

Nauvoo is only 95 miles Northwest of Springfield, and would have required a journey of about 130 miles over backwoods roads in 1839. However from April 22nd through April 25th, of that year Abraham Lincoln was in the very backyard of Nauvoo as he tried a murder case in Carthage, Illinois only 10 miles Southwest of the Mormon village. His client, William Fraim, was convicted of stabbing fellow steamboat laborer William Neathhammer in a drunken brawl.

After only a one day trial, the jury on April 23rd, sentenced Fraim to death by hanging. Court records show that Lincoln argued unsuccessfully to set aside the sentence on April 25th, but no detail exists to explain his whereabouts on Wednesday, April 24th, 1839. Lincoln very well could have traveled ten miles North by horseback to visit the new Mormon city abuilding.

The city charter of Navoo was filed with the Office of the Secretary of State of Illinois on December 18th, 1840. The man receiving the document was none other than Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival and then Secretary of State. We know that on one occasion, some two years later, all three of those men came even closer to crossing paths.

On January 2nd, 1843, Joseph Smith surrendered himself, and appeared in Springfield to face a federal court extradition hearing. The State of Missouri sought to bring him back upon allegations that the Prophet was an accessory to a conspiracy to assassinate a former Governor there.

Douglas, then a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, would have resided in the Capital city on that date. Correspondence and law records confirm that Lincoln too was home. The hearing was conducted with great public fanfare in the Federal courtroom on the second floor in the same building to which Lincoln 's law office would be relocated later in 1843. Contemporary accounts reveal many prominent citizens attended to glimpse the Prophet and to observe the proceedings. In fact, it became somewhat a social outing, when presiding judge Nathaniel Pope's wife insisted on sitting beside him astride the bench. On the other side sat another Springfield belle-Mrs. Abraham Lincoln !

While there is no record of contact or conversation in the courtroom between the Prophet and the would be President, the great likelihood of some exchange exists, and it is a certainty that Mary Lincoln reported directly to her husband on the events of the day. Especially so, when Smith was discharged by Judge Pope for lack of proof!

Later that year on May 18th, 1843 Joseph Smith dined with Stephen Douglas. After dinner Smith stated to Douglas “Judge, you will aspire to the presidency of the United States ”. Douglas did run some seventeen years later, against Lincoln.

By 1844, Joseph Smith was dead, but Nauvoo had become the 2 nd largest city in Illinois with 16,000 residents. It seems logical that Abraham Lincoln, a politically active and ambitious member of the Whig party, would have visited Nauvoo, in the early 1840's just as he did Chicago, the state's only larger metropolis in 1847 and afterward. Brigham Young moved the followers to Utah in 1846-1847 to avoid persecution in Illinois. Even so, indirect contacts between Lincoln, the Smith family and elements of the Church continued.

The 1858 campaign against Stephen Douglas for the United States Senate again took Lincoln to the neighborhood of Nauvoo. The next to last of seven debates between the candidates was to occur on October 13th, 1858 in Quincy, Illinois, the town where the Mormons had first arrived nineteen years earlier. In the days leading up to the scheduled event, Douglas delivered three addresses in surrounding Hancock County. This caused Lincoln to appear back in Carthage, which by now was a large town of 6,000 residents. Lincoln spoke there on October 22nd, 1858, then traveled 10 miles Northwest through or past Nauvoo and 4 miles further onward to Dallas City where he spoke on the 23rd.

Amazingly, Joseph Smith III, the eldest son of the deceased Prophet, traveled to Carthage twice to hear both Douglas and Lincoln deliver their remarks. He was still a practicing Saint and would not assume the leadership of a breakaway group called the Reformed Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints until 1860, some two years later.

Before the speeches, Smith was sympathetic to Stephen Douglas, who had reached out to the Mormon community since the mid-1840's seeking their continued political support.

However, he was disgusted when Douglas appeared to be intoxicated and had to cut short his remarks. A week later he listened to Abraham Lincoln talk from another platform in Carthage . After an “awkward” start, Lincoln 's humor, oratory and argument held young Smith spellbound. “By the time the lecture was over, I was completely and altogether a Lincoln man,” Joseph Smith III would state in an oral history taken late in his life, some fifty four years after the events.

As Chief Executive, Lincoln would be drawn into several political issues related to Utah Territory including anti-polygamy, statehood, political appointments and war taxes. President Brigham Young initially characterized Lincoln as no friend of the Church. However, the majority of the Saints sympathized with the Union cause and Mormon support for the Lincoln administration increased in Utah during his first term.

Upon hearing of his re-election, in 1864, the residents of Salt Lake were sufficiently enthusiastic about the President to fashion a celebratory parade a mile in length and offer patriotic speeches by church and military leaders with toasts to Lincoln 's health at a community banquet which followed receipt of the news.

Back in Washington , even in the first year of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln did his part to understand the legacy of Joseph Smith. On October 22nd, 1861 General James Arlington Benett had written Lincoln to ask whether between a thousand and ten thousand Mormons would be accepted as volunteer soldiers in the Union Army. While no answer is recorded, it does not appear that a federal troop of that magnitude was ever raised from Utah Territory . Even so, the inquiry apparently caused an amazing reaction in the Chief Executive.

Less than a month later, on November 18th, 1861 Abraham Lincoln checked out four books from the Library of Congress. The first was “The Works of Victor Hugo.” Two of the other three were: “The Mormons or Latter Day Saints,” by John Gunnison and “Mormonism, Its Leaders and Designs,” by John Hyde.

Four days later, on the 22nd, Lincoln borrowed two editions of the U.S. Constitution, a copy of the 1850 Census, four volumes of “The Works of Thomas Jefferson,” and a book entitled “The Mormons with Memoirs of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith”, by Henry Maheur.

And what of the fourth book, the other one, sought by Abraham Lincoln on November 18th, 1861, his 260th, day as President of the United States and exactly ten days before his first Thanksgiving dinner in the White House?

It was “The Book of Mormon; a Account Taken by the Hand of Mormon from the Plates of Nephi,” published in Palmyra, New York in 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr. Did Abraham Lincoln ever meet Joseph Smith? Did he ever visit Nauvoo? Did he read the entire Book of Mormon? Definitive answers to these questions may be impossible to ever reach now.

But we do know of Lincoln 's presence during the earliest days of the Saints in Illinois, at a location little more than an hour's horseback ride from Nauvoo and of his interest in the proceedings of a Springfield courtroom. The record also shows that Lincoln 's research and reading of Church history and doctrine was personal and in depth. Abraham Lincoln did know Joseph Smith, the Prophet, even if they never met.

This article is adapted from remarks delivered to a Relief Society Enrichment Night of the Foothills East Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in April, 2008, at the invitation of Sister Joan Boren, of that group. Mr. Leroy is a former Attorney General and Lt. Governor of Idaho and was United States Nuclear Waste Negotiator from 1990-1993. He and his wife Nancy live in Boise, Idaho. The 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln will be recognized on February 12th, 2009. Leroy's first book, entitled “Mr. Lincoln's Book”, will be released by Oak Knoll Press.