Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun and Lewis Cass responded, but none supported the kind of federal intervention that Mormons sought. Former President Martin Van Buren and Richard M. Johnson did not respond at all. So local leaders at the then-LDS headquarters in Nauvoo, Ill., passed a resolution endorsing Smith as a candidate on Jan. 29, 1844.

Poll wrote that Smith came up with a unique method of campaigning: calling for volunteer missionaries to visit every state, as Smith said, to "advocate the Mormon religion, purity of elections and to call upon the people to stand by the law and put down mobocracy." He vowed if elected to "protect the people in their rights and liberties."

Missionaries indeed went to all 26 states existing at the time and carried copies of Smith's platform (which also had been sent to President John Tyler, his Cabinet, members of Congress and Supreme Court justices). An emissary was sent to observe and possibly lobby for Smith at the forthcoming Whig and Democratic conventions.

Smith's platform called for elimination of slavery by compensating slave owners for their loss. He called for financing the government through tariffs and for creation of a national bank. He called for bringing Oregon and Texas into the Union.

But the missionary force could not persuade enough Americans to rally to protection of the church or Smith's cause. Persecution in Illinois intensified, and Smith was murdered by a mob there on June 27, 1844. Mobs would force the church out of Illinois and toward the Great Basin in 1846.

• George Romney, 1968. The former governor of Michigan and former head of American Motors managed to become the Republican front-runner in the early part of the 1968 race.

It was eight years after John F. Kennedy had proved a Catholic could become president, arguing that a candidate's religion should not matter. But at the time, the LDS Church did not ordain blacks to the priesthood (which would change in 1978), which prompted questions about whether that made Romney racist.

Life magazine reported that Romney told a ministerial association, "If my church prevented me as a public official from doing those things for social justice that I thought right, I would quit the church. But it does not."

Romney told the magazine U.S. News and World Report, "My church teaches me the Negro is my brother, and that the Negro can attain the celestial kingdom, just as I can." Also, he told a press conference, "All of us are equal as children of God, and equal citizens, and I accept this without reservation."

Romney would also point to his record as having actively opposed segregation and prejudice in Detroit and as a promoter of civil rights on issues ranging from race riots to desegregation of industries and public housing. Many in the press said that seemed to insulate him at the time from questions about blacks and the LDS priesthood.