Mill Creek Press - Letters to Mollie from her Mormon Past 1860-1912. Abraham Lincoln and Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., were in Springfield, Illinois, at the same time, and they may have met in U.S. Circuit Court Judge Nathaniel Pope’s courtroom on the last day of 1842. Lincoln, as a state representative, had voted for the unusual city charter that granted a military force, the Nauvoo Legion, to Nauvoo, the Latter Day Saints theocracy on the banks of the Mississippi River. Both Lincoln, a W