The "revelation" sanctioning plural marriages is dated July 12, 1843, and Lee says that Smith "dared not proclaim it publicly," but taught it "confidentially," urging his followers "to surrender themselves to God" for their salvation; and "in the winter of 1845, meetings were held all over the city of Nauvoo, and the spirit of Elijah was taught in the different families, as a foundation to the order of celestial marriage, as well as the law of adoption."* The Saints were also taught that Gentiles had no right to perform the marriage ceremony, and that their former marriage relations were invalid, and that they could be "sealed" to new wives under the authority of the church. *"Mormonism Unveiled," p. 165. Lee gives a complete record of his plural marriages, which is interesting, showing how the business was conducted at the start. His second wife, the daughter of a wealthy farmer near Quincy, Illinois, was "sealed" to him in Nauvoo in 1845, after she had been an inmate of his house for three months. His third and fourth wives were "sealed" to him soon after, but Young took a fancy to wife No. 3 (who had borne Lee a son), and, after much persuasion, she was "sealed" to Young. At this same "sealing" Lee took wife No. 4, a girl whom he had baptized in Tennessee. In the spring of 1845 two sisters of his first wife AND THEIR MOTHER were "sealed" to him; he married the mother, he says, "for the salvation of her eternal state." At the completion of the Nauvoo Temple he took three more wives. At Council Bluffs, in 1847, Brigham Young "sealed" him to three more, two of them sisters, in one night, and he secured the fourteenth soon after, the fifteenth in 1851, the sixteenth in 1856, the seventeenth in 1858 ("a dashing young bride"), the eighteenth in 1859, and the nineteenth and last in Salt Lake City. He says he claimed "only eighteen true wives," as he married Mrs. Woolsey "for her soul's sake, and she was nearly sixty years old." By these wives he had sixty-four children, of whom fifty-four were living when his book was written.