Lucy Walker

Lucy Walker’s account of her marriage to Joseph Smith centers on a conflict between prophetic authority and personal spiritual confirmation. Living in Smith’s household after the deaths and separation that had disrupted her family, she was asked to become one of his plural wives. She first refused to accept his declaration on its authority alone, insisting that she needed a revelation of her own; the experience she later described changed her decision, and she married him in Nauvoo on May 1, 1843, one day after turning seventeen.

Family Circumstances and Nauvoo

Walker’s family had suffered a series of losses before the marriage proposal. Her father had been among those shot during the Haun’s Mill Massacre, though he survived. Her mother died of malaria in Nauvoo in January 1842. In response to the family’s bereavement, Joseph Smith sent Walker’s father on a two-year mission to the eastern states. During his absence, Smith took Walker and most of her siblings into his household. Her father’s absence and her mother’s death thus formed the immediate family setting in which she encountered the proposal.

Nauvoo was not simply the place where Walker lived when the proposal occurred. Under Smith, it had become a theocratic principality whose unusually broad charter gave the church leader significant authority over the city. That surrounding concentration of religious and civic power helps locate Walker’s private encounter within a wider system organized around Smith’s leadership. The account, however, does not describe her family’s response to that political order or establish how Walker herself understood it.

The Proposal and Her Refusal

According to Walker’s memoir, Smith approached her while she was living in his home and told her that he had been commanded by God to take another wife and that she was the person intended. The proposal was framed not as an ordinary courtship but as a divine requirement. When Walker balked, Smith invoked the spiritual consequences of refusal and gave her until the following day to decide. The short deadline and the religious terms in which the choice was presented made the request a test of obedience as well as a marriage proposal.

Walker’s first response was resistance. Rather than agreeing solely because Smith claimed divine authority, she told him that she would not marry him unless she received a revelation for herself. Her condition matters to the shape of the episode: even within a relationship marked by an extreme imbalance of religious authority, the account gives her a specific demand and a moment in which she contests Smith’s claim to speak for God. Smith then assured her that she would receive a manifestation of God’s will. The memoir presents this assurance as the turning point that set the terms for the following night.

The Revelation and Marriage

Walker’s memoir describes a spiritual experience near dawn after a sleepless night. She recalled receiving a profound sense of peace and happiness, which she understood as a testimony confirming plural marriage. In her account, this experience did not merely comfort her; it supplied the personal religious confirmation she had made a condition of accepting Smith’s proposal. The episode therefore joins inward conviction to an external decision, while leaving readers with Walker’s own retrospective account as the principal record of how that conviction arose.

Afterward, Smith met Walker as she came downstairs. He took her by the hand, acknowledged that she had received the testimony, and blessed her. Walker married him on May 1, 1843, the day after her seventeenth birthday. The sequence is significant: the proposal, her resistance, the promised manifestation, the reported spiritual experience, and the marriage all occurred within a short span. Her account depicts a decision shaped by both pressure from a prophet and a religious experience she regarded as her own.

Plural Marriage and Narrative Significance

Walker’s marriage took place while Smith’s teaching on plural marriage was being kept secret. He formally codified the revelation on July 12, 1843, after Walker’s wedding; the church did not acknowledge it until 1852, eight years after his death. The chronology places her marriage within a practice not then publicly recognized by the church, and underscores the gap between the private religious claims made to prospective wives and the later public acknowledgment of the doctrine.

The episode does not provide a record of Walker’s later life or of the long-term course of her marriage. Its significance rests instead on the decision as she recounted it: a young woman living in the prophet’s home is confronted with a claimed divine command, resists until she receives confirmation on her own terms, and then accepts the marriage. That account complicates any simple portrayal of her as either wholly passive or wholly free to choose. It preserves her refusal and her demand for revelation, while also showing how Smith’s authority and the prospect of spiritual consequences framed the choice.