The Peace Maker

The Peace Maker is an 1842 tract that gives plural marriage a sweeping biblical and political rationale: it presents male rule within marriage as part of a divinely ordained order meant to restore peace, authority, and religious life. In the book, the tract becomes more than a historical curiosity when Dan Lafferty finds it during his investigation of Mormon polygamy and takes it as evidence in his rejection of the modern church and its accommodation to civil government.

Discovery and Historical Setting

Near the end of five years in California, Dan and Matilda Lafferty heard a member of their local ward discuss plural marriage. A show of hands revealed that nearly everyone in the congregation came from a polygamous background. The moment prompted Dan to investigate the practice and its history more closely.

After completing his chiropractic training, Dan returned with his family to Utah County and pursued that research in the special collections at Brigham Young University. There he came across a fifty-one-page typescript of The Peace Maker, a nineteenth-century tract attributed to the otherwise mysterious Udney Hay Jacob. Its title page stated that it had been published in 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois, and identified Joseph Smith as its printer. The discovery placed a specific document, rather than a general account of plural marriage, at the center of Dan’s inquiry.

The tract’s publication details connected it to a period when the Latter-day Saint community was building institutions as well as defending religious claims. Nauvoo had been granted an unusual charter by the Illinois General Assembly in 1840. Under Joseph Smith, it developed into a theocratic principality with powers exceptional in the state and nation. This context does not establish that the tract itself governed Nauvoo; it does show how questions of religious authority and public power surrounded the document’s setting.

The Tract’s Argument

The Peace Maker offers a biblical defense of plural marriage and casts it as a remedy for problems attributed to monogamous relationships and, by extension, to society. Its proposed domestic order is explicitly hierarchical: the husband is assigned authority over the wife, while the wife is expected to submit rather than teach or exercise authority over him. The tract makes women’s subordination part of its claim about divine law, not merely a private arrangement between spouses.

It extends that claim from the household to the nation. In the tract’s account, correctly understanding and enforcing its prescribed order would restore peace, establish proper governance over families, recover divine penal law, and drive Satan from human thought. Marriage thus becomes the mechanism through which a larger religious and political order is supposed to be repaired. The promised cure is inseparable from the concentration of authority in husbands and from the enforcement of a divinely sanctioned hierarchy.

That logic makes the tract’s title particularly revealing: its vision of peace depends not on equal standing within marriage but on establishing what it treats as the proper head of the family. The text joins a defense of plural marriage to a program for ordering domestic life, religious authority, and society as a whole.

Dan Lafferty’s Use of the Text

Dan encountered the tract while trying to understand the history of plural marriage among the Latter-day Saints. He treated its content and publication information as significant evidence in his growing argument that the modern church had departed from an earlier religious order. His subsequent discussions with his brothers focused on the limits of government authority. Using scripture from The Book of Mormon, he argued that the government had no right to require licenses, taxes, or Social Security numbers, and he described such requirements as claims of control over ordinary life.

The tract’s importance in this development is specific: it supplied Dan with a historical text that joined polygamy to an expansive account of divine law and household authority. The evidence does not show that The Peace Maker originated his convictions, or that its arguments alone determined his later actions. Rather, he encountered it within a self-directed study that increasingly convinced him that the modern church had gone astray when it abandoned plural marriage under pressure from the government.

Law, Authority, and Later Contexts

The book places the tract’s ideas alongside broader conflicts over which authority should prevail when religious doctrine and civil law disagree. Brigham Young defended plural marriage as a religious practice beyond the reach of the federal government and maintained that God’s laws took precedence over human laws. In Deseret, the Mormon-controlled Utah Territorial Legislature expanded the authority of local probate courts, which Brigham controlled; many judges were Mormon bishops, and church direction shaped the juries’ verdicts. This institutional arrangement illustrates a later contest over religious and civil jurisdiction, not proof that The Peace Maker dictated those legal measures.

The book also describes modern fundamentalist communities in which religious authority reaches into marriage and family life. In Colorado City, men commonly legally married only their first wife, while later wives were spiritually married and remained unmarried in the eyes of the state. Under UEP doctrine, wives and children were treated as belonging to the priesthood and could be reassigned by its leader. These examples give concrete form to the stakes raised by the tract’s insistence on male and religious authority, while remaining distinct practices and episodes rather than a demonstrated chain of direct influence from the text.

The Peace Maker therefore occupies two related but different places in the account: it is a historical defense of a prescribed marital hierarchy, and it is a document Dan encountered while assembling a fundamentalist case against modern religious and governmental authority. Its arguments illuminate the ambitions of that case without making the tract itself a complete explanation for the institutions, conflicts, or personal decisions that followed.