Joseph Smith and Lucy Walker

Joseph Smith and Lucy Walker’s marriage in Nauvoo in 1843 was presented as a plural marriage founded on divine command, but its account also records a young woman’s resistance and her demand for revelation of her own. Lucy was seventeen when she married Joseph, after he had told her that God required the marriage and that refusal would have eternal consequences. The sequence makes the relationship significant not only as one of Joseph’s plural marriages, but as an example of how prophetic authority, personal revelation, and pressure could converge in a single decision.

Lucy Walker’s Circumstances in Nauvoo

Lucy’s family life had been disrupted by loss before Joseph proposed marriage. Her father had survived the Haun’s Mill Massacre, and in January 1842 her mother died of malaria, an illness common in Nauvoo. Joseph sent Lucy’s bereaved father on a two-year mission to the eastern states, described as a way to help him recover from his grief. During her father’s absence, Joseph took Lucy and most of her siblings into his household as adopted children.

That arrangement placed Lucy inside Joseph’s home and within his immediate religious and domestic authority. The account does not present the proposal as a courtship between equals or describe a relationship developing over time. Instead, Joseph approached Lucy in the setting of his household and explained that he had been commanded to take another wife. Her family’s recent losses and her father’s absence form the circumstances surrounding that approach, though the evidence does not say that Joseph used those circumstances as an argument for marriage.

The Proposal and Lucy’s Resistance

Lucy was astonished by Joseph’s proposal and initially resisted it. Joseph told her that the marriage was a command from God, gave her until the following day to decide, and warned that rejecting it would close the way to salvation. The deadline and the threatened spiritual consequence made the choice more than a private proposal: refusal was framed as a decision with eternal stakes.

Lucy’s response, as recounted in her memoir, was to insist on a revelation of her own. She said she would not marry Joseph unless she personally received divine confirmation that God wanted her to do so. This demand set a limit on Joseph’s claim to speak for God in her case. Rather than simply accepting his assertion, she asked for direct evidence that she could regard as her own testimony. Joseph then assured her that she would receive a manifestation of God’s will.

Revelation and Marriage

Lucy’s memoir describes the experience that followed as occurring near dawn after another sleepless night. She reported receiving a powerful spiritual confirmation of plural marriage, accompanied by calm, peace, and happiness. In her account, this experience changed her response: the revelation became an anchor for her through later trials, and she felt compelled to express her gratitude.

Joseph was present when she came downstairs. He took her hand, acknowledged that she had received the testimony he had promised, and blessed her. The account thus links Lucy’s stated acceptance to her own reported revelation, while also showing Joseph’s continuing role as the person who had made the proposal and interpreted its religious significance. These details are given through Lucy’s memoir; they establish how she later described the experience, not an independently verifiable account of divine intervention.

Lucy married Joseph on May 1, 1843, one day after her seventeenth birthday. The date fixes the marriage within the period when Joseph was entering plural marriages with numerous women. The book says that between 1840 and 1844 he was instructed, as he understood it, to marry about forty women, and notes that several were very young. Lucy’s account is distinctive in describing both the pressure attached to the proposal and her insistence on personal confirmation before agreeing.

Prophetic Authority and Personal Revelation

The episode sits within a broader tension in Joseph Smith’s teaching about revelation. He had encouraged Latter-day Saints to seek impressions from God for guidance in their lives, but later restricted the reception of commandments concerning church doctrine to himself. That restriction addressed a problem of competing claims: if followers could receive revelations that contradicted the prophet, the authority of his own revelations could be challenged. Lucy’s demand for a personal manifestation therefore echoes a principle Joseph had popularized even as the proposed marriage rested on his claim to have received a command for her.

The account does not resolve that tension. Lucy’s reported experience is presented as the turning point that enabled her to accept the marriage, while the terms of the proposal had already been defined by Joseph’s prophetic authority and warning. Her story consequently holds together two elements that could pull in different directions: the appeal of direct communication with God and the immense influence of the prophet who announced what God supposedly required.

The marriage also belonged to a doctrine Joseph had formally codified in a revelation dated July 12, 1843. That revelation remained secret and was not acknowledged until 1852, eight years after his death. This chronology places Lucy’s May marriage before the formal codification described in the book, while showing that the doctrine’s public recognition came much later. The relationship is therefore recorded within a period when plural marriage was practiced under religious authority but was not openly acknowledged in the same way it would be after 1852.