Jesse Gause  Jesse Gause (1785 – c. 1836) was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and served in the First Presidency as a counselor to church president Joseph Smith. For decades Gause was generally unknown to LDS historians, and so could be considered Mormonism's "lost counselor" of the First Presidency. It was only in the 1980s that research identified his rightful place among early Church leaders. The son of William Gause and Mary Beverly, Gause was born in 1785 in East Marlborough, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Gause followed the faith of his parents and in 1806, apparently still single at twenty-one, he requested and was received into the Society of Friends, becoming a Quaker. Although a Quaker in good standing, Gause's Quaker pacificism did not prevent him from joining the Delaware militia in 1814 during the War of 1812. Upon leaving the military in 1815 he moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where he married Martha Johnson. In 1822, the family finally settled in Chester County where he became a teacher in a Quaker school. Martha died in 1828 after the birth of their fourth child. In the same year of Martha's death, Gause married a woman named Minerva, and they settled in Hancock, Massachusetts. Shortly after the birth of a daughter, Gause resigned from the Quakers on January 30, 1829, and joined the Shakers. Gause's new wife followed him, apparently accepting the Shaker practice of sexual abstinence even for married couples. In 1831, Gause, his wife, and infant daughter moved to the Shaker community near North Union, Ohio, leaving Martha's four children in the care of his sister, who was also a Shaker. At the same time that Gause was moving to North Union, Latter Day Saints from New York were also emigrating to Ohio, settling in the environs of Kirtland, some fifteen miles east of North Union. It is not known when Gause came into contact with these new settlers, but some time after October 1831 he was baptized; this time his wife refused to follow him. Gause rose quickly to a position of prominence in his new faith; in an early record book it states that on March 8, 1832, Joseph Smith "[c]hose this day and ordained brother Jesse Gause and Broth[er] Sidney [Rigdon] to be my counsellors of the ministry of the presidency of the High Priesthood".