perdition because he sought repentance at the hand of God carefully with tears all his life afterward. Therefore, he was promised that though he would go through hell, his soul would not be left there. If a sealed and anointed person broke their covenants to any extent short of unpardonable sin, they could possibly still gain their exaltation and become joint-heirs with Christ in the afterlife, conditional upon the utmost efforts possible being given to repentance, up to and possibly including forsaking one's life for forgiveness. They would be "destroyed in the flesh, and shall be delivered unto the buffetings of Satan unto the day of redemption" (D&C 132:26). The revelation did not, however, specify the mechanism by which such people would be "destroyed in the flesh," and it did not indicate whether that "redemption" would be the result of the sinner's own blood or the result of the atonement of Jesus. Blood atonement teachings during the Brigham Young administration Teachings by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve As far as scholars can tell, the author of the blood atonement doctrine was LDS Church president Brigham Young, who first taught the doctrine after the death of Joseph Smith. The doctrine first began to be taught, however, during the period when Brigham Young was Governor of the Utah Territory a period also known as the Mormon Reformation (1856–1858), particularly by Jedediah M. Grant of the First Presidency. Public talk of blood atonement diminished substantially by the end of the Mormon Reformation in 1858 when Young was replaced as territorial governor by Alfred Cumming. The subject of blood atonement remained largely dormant until the 1870s, when the issue was revived by the national media during the John D. Lee trials for his role in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Development of the doctrine in the 1840s and early 1850s When Brigham Young led the Saints from Nauvoo, Illinois to the Salt Lake valley beginning in the mid-1840s, he and his followers intended to establish a theocracy independent of the United States, where there would be no distinction between church and state. (For Mormon theocratic political theory, see Theodemocracy). Brigham Young's first recorded teachings on the blood atonement doctrine were in 1845, when Young had stepped into the shoes of Joseph Smith, the previous theocratic leader who had been killed in 1844. That year, he was said to have approved of a