A correspondent signing himself “Utah” wrote to the New York Times in March 1857 with a one-sided catalog of “treasonous events” by the Mormons against the United States. One of the recent actions “Utah” charged against the Mormons was this:
On the night of the 29th of December last [1856] the office of the Clerk of the United States Supreme Court, which was also the office of the United States Circuit Court, was broken open and robbed of all the records, books and papers of every kind, together with the libraries of Judge Stiles and T.S. Williams, containing some nine hundred volumes. These were all thrown into the vault of a privy in an adjoining yard, after which they were covered with straw, shingles and other combustibles, and the whole were burned and utterly destroyed. This was the first stab taken towards the breaking up of the United States Courts. The city authorities and Governor Young take not the least notice of the affair, while the citizens chuckle over it as a clever trick.