He was a member of the Reform Party, a short-lived coalition of Democrats, reform and Liberal Republicans, and Grangers formed in 1873 in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, which had secured the election for two years of William Robert Taylor as Governor of Wisconsin,[2] as well as electing a number of state legislators, but failed to thrive.
His mother, Sarah Jacoba Smith, was a Vlissingen native from a prominent local family of English and Dutch ancestry.
A few years after Sarah's second marriage, and after the second bankruptcy of her husband the whole family came to the United States, taking passage at Antwerp on a sailing ship that landed them at New York City.
They proceeded to Albany, New York, and thence by canals and the Great Lakes to Milwaukee, landing July 3, 1848, and there they settled down on a farm.
[4] They moved to Alto in Fond du Lac County in 1861, where he worked as a retail clerk in a general store.
Fagg had been a teetotaler for many years, and increasingly argued that the only acceptable place for him in political matters was as a lecturer for the cause of Prohibition.
By 1895, Fagg was reported to have suffered financial reversals, and to be working as day labor at the Wisconsin State Capitol building.
When he went to Milwaukee in 1896 to attend the funeral of his step-father, the Wisconsin State Journal observed, "Of the sixty-two voters in the family and connections of Peter Fagg, there is only one [D]emocrat.