Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart and shall cleave unto her and none else.

Doctrine and Covenant section 42, verse 22.

Hey listeners, this is Nick from Book of Mormon Central, and today's podcast addresses the question,

Who wrote the peacemaker pamphlet?

In the 1960s, a pamphlet claiming to be a little-known discourse by the prophet Joseph Smith

began circulating among certain Utah circles. The pamphlet purported to present the so-called

biblical view of marriage, presenting arguments

that wives should be regarded as their husband's property, and as such, could not divorce their

husbands, rather only a husband could initiate divorce in marriage.

The pamphlet also advanced arguments for the practice of polygamy, as found in the Bible.

The provenance of this

pamphlet, who published it, and why they attributed it to Joseph Smith, is murky. But a line-by-line

comparison quickly revealed that it was actually a slightly edited and reworked reprint of an

1842 pamphlet entitled, an extract, from a manuscript entitled The Peacemaker, or the Doctrine

of the Millennium, simply called the Peacemaker for short, by a man named Udney Hayes Jacob,

sometimes referred to as Jacobs.

In the peacemaker, Jacob argued that restoring his highly extreme patriarchal view of biblical marriage

would somehow bring peace and order to the United States. Some extremists, most famously the brothers

and murderers, Dan and Ron Lafferty, have used this pamphlet to justify their radical beliefs

about marriage and polygamy. Jacob was not a Latter-day Saint when the pamphlet was printed.

The pamphlet was, however, printed in Navu on a press owned by Joseph Smith and operated by John Taylor.

As was a typical practice in that era, the title page listed the owner of the press, Joseph Smith, as the printer.

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