p325  Politics

 p327  Should sessions of the first constitutional convention of Iowa be opened with prayer? This was the question before delegates as, sixty-three strong, they gathered at the Old Stone Capitol in Iowa City on Monday, October 7, 1844.

Abner Kneeland, the freethinker, Pantheist, had just died at Salubria and his influence was yet fresh. Ex‑governor Lucas (a delegate) said that 'if ever an assemblage needed the aid of Almighty Power, it is one to organize a system of Government'. Said another delegate: 'This is a day of improvement. Let those who believe so much in prayer, pray at home'. Another addressing Governor Lucas said that a prayer each day would cost at least $300 for the session — why not do as Benjamin Franklin had suggested to his father: 'Say grace over the whole barrel of pork at once?' 'In the name of Heaven', shouted one delegate, 'don't force men to hear prayers!' By a vote of forty-four to twenty-six, prayers were indefinitely postponed.230

The Constitutional Convention of 1844 is remembered for a sentiment, one advanced by an ex-member, Enoch W. Eastman of Mahaska County, a New  p328 Hampshire Yankee 'six feet in the clear', gaunt and quaint. Eastman from 1864 to 1866 was Lieutenant Governor of Iowa, and to him we are indebted for State's motto on the Washington Monument: 'Iowa: the affections of her people, like the rivers of her borders, flow to an inseparable Union'.231

Slavery

To the American Civil War, and to the agitation which set it going, Iowa made noteworthy contributions.

The State changed its United States Senators. In 1855 Augustus Caesar Dodge, replaced as Senator by James Harlan, was thereupon appointed minister to Spain. But what of Senator George Wallace Jones? As in 1855 Dodge fell before Harlan, so in 1859 Jones fell before James W. Grimes. And as Dodge was translated to Madrid, so Jones was translated to Bogotá. As a diplomat, Jones had aptitudes — especially for a Latin post. His wife, Josephine Grégoire, was of French extraction and he himself spoke the French tongue. Spanish he soon achieved. With the polite inhabitants of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, Jones — curled, scented, gallant, a son of Rome — was a figure of no mean magnitude.

At the Iowa Methodist Conference of 1854 at Dubuque, Senator Jones had met the Rev. Henry Clay  p329 Dean, and in due time the latter became chaplain of the United States Senate.​232 'Mr. Jones', said the Muscatine Journal not long after the appointment of Dean, 'made his maiden speech in reply to Mr. Harlan. The Senator got along very well with the reading at first but it soon was apparent that he could not read his own hand-writing. . . . This recurring so often excited surprise and it was whispered about that the speech was not his but the Rev. Henry Clay Dean's who stood behind the chair of the President of the Senate in great trepidation at the halting manner in which Senator Jones was getting on. . . . One of the Senators went behind the chair of the President and said to the clergyman, "How is it, Mr. Dean, that you allow your Senator to make himself so ridiculous by such a speech as he is now delivering?" The Chaplain reddened and stammered out, "what have I to do with Mr. Jones's speech? I don't see him often".'

As successors of Jones and Dodge, Harlan and Grimes sounded for Iowa the anti-slavery or moral note — the note sounded for Ohio by Salmon P. Chase; for New York by William H. Seward; and Massachusetts by Charles Sumner.

Under­ground
The Quaker and the Puritan

The Under­ground Railway in Iowa came to the surface at Salem and Denmark — the one community, Quaker; the other, Congregational. Suit was once brought in Iowa for damages for aiding runaway Missouri slaves. The complainant was a Missourian, Ruel Daggs, and the defendants were Salemites. Of the latter, six were amerced in the sum of $2900.  p331 Daggs, furthermore, sent north a body of mounted Missourians to make search at Salem for other fugitives. Hearing of this, Denmark (Puritan, and militant) gathered a rifle squad and marched as to war.233

Dred Scott

In 1856 Iowa brought to birth a novel, Emma Bartlett, or Prejudice and Fanaticism — 'the first Iowa book so far as we are aware', says the Des Moines Valley Whig, 'of any particular pretensions'.234

'The scene', so the Davenport Democrat writes in October, 1856, 'is shifted from Germany to Boston, and from Boston to Alabama, and presents one of the most glaring exposures of religious hypocrisy and cool deliberate villainy on the part of man who [though] a leading Know-Nothing [anti-Catholic] and Abolitionist professing abhorrence to Southern oppression [of the negro] and to Catholic intrigue, [yet] at the same time planned and executed one of the most hellish plots against the innocence and peace of a beautiful orphan girl'. 'Kate Harrington' (Josephine Pollard), a Keokuk woman, was the author and fifty copies of the book were sold there the day of its publication.235

Then in 1857, to redress the balance, there came to Keokuk the play Uncle Tom's Cabin. 'Go to the Athenaeum', urged the Keokuk Gate City, 'if you wish  p332 to see this thrilling moral drama well played — Uncle Tom by Signiago and Little Eva by La Petite Borriette are highly praised'. But more cogent against Slavery than the fictive slave 'Uncle Tom' was the actual slave Dred Scott.

Dred was not unknown to Iowa. He belonged to Dr. John Emerson, a United States army surgeon, who in 1834 had brought him from St. Louis to Fort Armstrong, Rock Island. While at the Fort, Dr. Emerson built for himself in Davenport a brick house on East Second Street, and when afterward the troops were removed to Fort Snelling (Minnesota), he took Dred with him. In 1846 Dred, prompted by Abolitionists, brought suit in a Missouri State court for his freedom. Had he not dwelt in three free sections of the country — the State of Illinois, the Territory of Wisconsin (Iowa District), and the State of Minnesota? In Missouri a jury declared him free; but this finding was overthrown by the United States Supreme Court at St. Louis and the case fell to the Supreme Court of the United States. Here the finding was that neither under the Declaration of Independence nor under the Federal Constitution could a negro attain American citizen­ship save by express legislation. Dred Scott, therefore, could not sue for freedom. Incidentally it followed that the Missouri Compromise, limiting negro slavery, was null and void.236

 p333  John Brown

'We heard', writes from Osawatomie, Kansas, on May 27, 1856, Edward P. Bridgman, a Massachusetts lad, 'that 5 men had been killed by Free State men. The men were butchered — ears cut off & the bodies thrown into the river the murdered men (Proslavery) had thrown out threats & insults, yet the act was barbarous & inhuman whoever committed by. . . . Weds eve. Since yesterday I have learned that those men who committed those murders were a party of Browns. One of them was formerly in the wool business in Springfield'.237

At Springdale, Iowa, (August 13, 1859) there dwelt a Quaker, Moses Varney. He had heard that Brown with his band of Free State men, formerly quartered at Springdale, was meditating an attack on Harper's Ferry and was sore distraught. A friend of Varney's (A. L. Smith of Buffalo, New York) was at the time stopping  p334 with his cousins, Benjamin F. Gue and David J. Gue, in Iowa on Rock Creek (Scott County), and the three drove over to Springdale to call on 'Friend Varney'. The topic of conversation was John Brown — John Brown and his Springdale following of whom two, Edwin and Barclay Coppoc, had but recently gone to Brown at the Ferry.

From the meeting with Varney, Smith and the Gues returned to Rock Creek. It was determined to warn (anonymously) the Secretary of War, John B. Floyd, of the impending Harper's Ferry onslaught. Two letters were written: one by Smith, dated Philadelphia, August 18th, which was sent to the Postmaster at Philadelphia to be mailed; the other, written by David J. Gue, was sent for mailing to the Postmaster at Cincinnati. Of the Smith letter nothing was ever heard. The David J. Gue letter ran thus: 'I have discovered the existence of a secret organization having for its object the liberation of the slaves of the South by a general insurrection. The leader of the movement is "Old John Brown," late of Kansas. . . . They will pass down through Pennsylvania and Maryland, and enter Virginia at Harper's Ferry. . . . I dare not sign my name to this, but trust that you will not disregard the warning on that account'.

Secretary Floyd received this letter, but he failed to be stirred.​238 By the end of the 18th of October  p335 five of Brown's band of twenty-two were prisoners of the State of Virginia — John Brown, Edwin Coppoc, Aaron D. Stevens, and two negroes, Green and Copeland. John E. Cook and Albert Hazlett were arrested later. On December 2nd, John Brown (Robert E. Lee, 'Stonewall Jackson, John Wilkes Booth looking on) was hanged. Cook, Coppoc, Green, and Copeland were hanged on the 16th of December. Stevens and Hazlett were executed the following spring.

Both in the East and in the West, Brown had high placed abettors. In the East: F. B. Sanborn, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, G. L. Stearns, and Gerrit Smith. In the West: William Penn Clarke and Josiah B. Grinnell. The Easterners (their letters seized) were for the most part in kind. The Westerners (their letters seized) held their ground.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Dred Scott Decision, the John Brown Raid — such for Iowa, as for all America, between 1852 and 1860 was the momentous sequence.

Samuel J. Kirkwood

In 1859 the Iowa Republicans nominated Kirkwood for Governor; while the Democrats countered with the nomination of Augustus Caesar Dodge, just home from his mission to Spain. Kirkwood in Iowa was a miller and told his beads to Ceres. He had not always  p336 followed this calling. He came to the State from Ohio where he had been a lawyer and a politician. He had 'a big head, long hair hang underneath like an Indian's and was 'of swarthy complexion'. Something of an Abe Lincoln type, he was known both in Ohio and in Iowa as 'Sam' — 'Honest Sam'. But appear as he might, he was educated. He had had the unusual opportunity (for a yeoman in the fifties) of four consecutive years of study in an academy at Washington, D. C. He read Latin and even Greek, and kept the power through life.

As Illinois had had the Lincoln-Douglas debates, so, too, would Iowa have debates — Kirkwood against Dodge. To a particular debate Dodge came in a carriage drawn by four white horses. Kirkwood had preceded him in a hayrack drawn by oxen. A democratic editor said: 'We don't care a copper whether Sam Kirkwood smells rank and strong of sweat and dirt, so long as he remains at home among his hogs', while of Dodge a Republican editor sang:

In 1859 the Republicans of Iowa had as champions Harlan and Grimes. But they had others as well: Samuel F. Miller, John A. Kasson, Josiah B. Grinnell,  p337 Samuel R. Curtis, Grenville M. Dodge, Hawkins Taylor, Jacob Butler, Henry O'Connor, George G. Wright, Henry P. Scholte, James B. Weaver, William P. Hepburn, Henry Clay Caldwell, William Penn Clarke, Coker F. Clarkson, James F. Wilson, John H. Gear, and William B. Allison. The one of them a man of genius; but what was better, he was a man of balance.

Henry Clay Dean

The genius in Iowa politics in the years of Grimes, Harlan, Dodge, and Kirkwood was not a Republican but a Democrat — the Rev. Henry Clay Dean. A genius in politics, Dean was in no sense a political genius. His powers were emotional, as were those of Henry Ward Beecher. Dean was educated, had a prodigious memory, absorbed history, and spoke ringing words on 'Temperance', 'The Immortality of the Soul', 'Mistakes of Ingersoll', 'The French Revolution', and 'The Old Senate'. But in themselves his outgivings like Beecher's were banal.

Henry Clay Dean was short, stout, with a big head black hair, rather deep set black eyes, a musical voice, and a heavy face. He was not over clean — 'dirty Dean' he was called. 'Alcibiades', he once said, 'greatly diverted the people of Athens and set their tongues to wagging, by cutting off his dog's tail with a butcher's  p338 cleaver in the public market place.​a I have succeeded quite as well with my dirty shirt'. As the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson swilled tea, so Dean swilled coffee — cup after cup. 'He was', says Judge George G. Wright, his one time neighbor in Keosauqua, 'a gormandizer . . . ready to eat all the time and more than any two ordinary men'. 'When he left Iowa', wrote an editor, 'it was erroneously supposed that he had settled on the Missouri River, which moved an Iowa paper to say: "The two big muddies have formed a junction".'

Spouting fire, citing Scripture, uttering perfervid prayer while tying his shoe lace, bidding rejecters of immortality to get down and 'root' with their fellows, Dean, it was said, 'melted sinners like old pewter'.240

Aside from bold and timely financiering, the Kirkwood gubernatorial administration is memorable first for the inaugural referring to the 'mad attempt' of John Brown, and next for the refusal (on legal grounds) to honor a re­quisition of the Governor of Virginia for the rendition of Barclay Coppoc.

Lincoln — Iowa — The War

Just how widely had Lincoln become known prior to his contest with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858? In Iowa the Lincoln-Douglas debates did not put Lincoln in the forefront. He was not yet news. Iowa in truth  p339 was not wholly awake to Lincoln at the time of his nomination in 1860.​241 However, in 1858, the Keokuk Gate City quotes from the Rochester Democrat (New York) words of commendation by the Republicans of Chicago: 'Mr. Lincoln has won a reputation as a statesman and an orator. . . . The speeches made during the Illinois campaign have been read with great interest throughout the Country. . . . The Republicans of the Union will rejoice to honor the distinguished debater of Illinois'. Then in 1859 the Keokuk Gate City notes: 'The Chicago Democrat strongly urges the nomination of Abe Lincoln for the Vice-Presidency or for any other office requiring talent, integrity, and Republican sentiment'. This the Gate City follows a little later by observing: 'In Pennsylvania the Reading Journal, a paper of standing and influence, intimates its preference for Lincoln for President'.

The nomination of Lincoln when it came evoked a varied reaction. 'This band of Negro worshippers', said the Council Bluffs Bugle in May, 1860, 'nominated upon the fourth ballot Abe Lincoln for President and the renegade Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for Vice-President. . . . Why did the convention select as the standard bearer of their party two obscure men in place of such a man as Seward, whose fame as a statesman and whose political views are known wherever  p340 the English language is spoken? Why were Senators Chase, Wade, Hale, Cameron and "Poor Sumner", all of whom are as much superior to Lincoln in point of intellect and statesman­ship as he is superior to the most common school boy of the country, forced to give place to "Honest Abe" of Illinois?'

Nor did members of the Hanks family keep silent. 'In last week's issue of the Chronicle [Decatur, Illinois]', wrote 'Charles Hanks' in July, 1860: 'I noticed a letter signed "John Hanks" which is so extraordinary in many features that I feel called upon to give it a brief notice. In this left I find a long and pathetic allusion to Cousin Abe's early and hard life. That may be poetical, but there is but little that is true. . . . In Abe's young days he was simply a wild harum-scarum boy. . . . His laziness was the cause of many mortifications to me. . . . I have often felt ashamed of Cousin Abe in seeing him a full-grown man, gadding about the country barefoot. . . . I think and am almost certain that the rails that are now being worshipped all over the North as Lincoln's rails were made by poor Bill Strickland'.242

At the convention which nominated Lincoln for President two or three Iowans stood for him from the first. They were Alvin Saunders, Charles C. Nourse, and Governor Samuel J. Kirkwood. Lincoln nominated,  p341 however, there had come to Iowa on his behalf William H. Seward. In opposition there had come no other than Stephen A. Douglas himself, rival presidential nominee as aforetime rival for the Senate. Kirkwood genuinely liked Lincoln — he was his sort. Lincoln was moderate; he was no 'woolly'. In 1862 Governor Kirkwood wrote to Washington: 'I shall not have any regrets if it is found that a part of the dead [in this war] are niggers'. And in 1863 he wrote: 'I supported the administration in conducting the war before it struck at slavery. I support it now when it strikes at slavery and I shall continue to support it if it ceases to strike at slavery'.243

Battles and Leaders

The battles of the Civil War in which Iowa troops fought ranged from Missouri to Virginia. They were notably Wilson's Creek, under General Nathaniel Lyon; and Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Corinth, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, under General U. S. Grant. Then there was Atlanta and the 'March to the Sea' under General William T. Sherman with the conflicts at Allatoona, Franklin, and Nashville. Finally, there was the battle of Winchester under General Philip H. Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and the struggle for Mobile.

Wilson's Creek put Iowa as a fighting factor in the  p342 van. At the time of the battle Governor Kirkwood was in Washington — an object of little heed. When the news came, he said that 'every man who saw me had to shake hands with me, and placing my hat at an angle of 45 degrees, I stalked through the building [of the War Department] as though I owned it — and they let me'.

Shiloh for Iowa was outstanding. The State had in that engagement more men in proportion to population than any other State of the North — eleven full regiments, besides three companies in a Missouri regiment. It was the scene of the 'Hornet's Nest' — a natural rifle pit held chiefly by Iowans, whence, in the words of the son of the Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston, there 'blazed for six hours . . . sheets of flame'. It was a position 'whose infernal gates poured forth a murderous storm of shot and shell and musket-fire which no living thing could quell or withstand'.244

Confederate armies, be it said, were not the only enemy Iowa had to confront during the Civil War. There were the Sioux Indians, the Missourians (at times blood-thirsty), and the Disloyalists or 'Copperheads'; and there were 'seekers after gold' in the Rocky Mountains.245

Iowa gave to the War gallant characters: Marcellus  p343 M. Crocker of the Crocker Brigade, 'fit', said General Grant, 'to command an independent army'; John M. Corse, hero of Allatoona, 'Hold the fort for I am coming!'; and Grenville M. Dodge, to whom Grant turned with confidence in 'Emergency' cases.

The Civil War inspired some not unworthy song and verse: John Brown's Body, The Bay Fight, Marching through Georgia, Hold the Fort, . . . Sheridan's Ride; An Iowan uttered the stirring lines:

Iowa did much to set on its high pilgrimage the soul (not void of stain) of John Brown. But for the most part, the State, with its negro population of but 1169, took toward slavery the soberer attitude of President Lincoln. Sometimes, through its Governor, Iowa roundly censured the President. At a personal conference with the latter, Governor Kirkwood said: 'Our Iowa people fear and I fear that the Administration is afraid to remove Gen. McClellan'.

The Civil War at its close was marked for Iowa by a charming event. Early in 1868 Mary, the daughter of Senator James Harlan, was claimed in marriage by Robert, the son of Abraham Lincoln. The War, too,  p344 at its close was marked by distinctive services by Iowa to the restored nation — services which challenged the aptitudes of great lawyer-statesmen.

---

The Author's Notes:

230 Shambaugh's History of the Constitutions of Iowa, pp186 et seq.; Shambaugh's Fragments of the Debates of the Iowa Constitutional Conventions of 1844 and 1846, pp12 et seq.

231 Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1844 comprised forty-six farmers, nine lawyers, five physicians, three merchants, two mechanics, two miners, two millwrights, one printer, one miller, and one civil engineer. The Constitution of 1844 (rejected) was followed by the Constitution of 1846, and that of 1846 by the Constitution (p444)of 1857. Meanwhile (1855) 'Prohibition' had been enacted in Iowa and was pressed upon the Constitutional Convention of 1857, but was not taken up, and the same year the statute itself was modified.

232 C. C. Nourse's Beginning Fifty years of Practice at the Iowa Bar in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. VIII, pp492 et seq.; Parish's George Wallace Jones, p276.

233 O. A. Garretson's Travelling on the Under­ground Railroad in Iowa in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. XXII, pp418 et seq.; Jacob Van Ek's Under­ground Railroad in Iowa in The Palimpsest, Vol. II, pp129 et seq.

With regard to the fine of $2900, it may be interesting to note that the parties affected had prepared for it betimes by placing their worldly goods beyond the reach of the law.

234 Not till 1863 did there appear (in Arthur's Home Magazine of Philadelphia) There is no Death, a poem by J. L. McCreery of Delaware County, Iowa. The poem, long ascribed to E. Bulwer, Lord Lytton, begins with the stanza:

This stanza, which has gone the world around and seems to be undying, was quoted in 1922, at the unveiling in Washington, D. C., of the Grant Memorial, by General Julian S. Carr, Commander in Chief of the United Confederate Veterans.

In 1864 the song (words and music), The Little Brown Church in the Vale, itself of world wide reach, was made public by its author, William Savage Pitts, a New Englander. It came from a mood evoked by a sunset seen at the spot in Iowa (Bradford) where the Little Brown Church now stands. — Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XII, pp101 et seq.

235 The book Emma Bartlett is now rare. Though copyrighted, there is no copy in the Library of Congress. Mr. Joseph Ayres of Keokuk, a nephew of Josephine Pollard, loaned the present writer his copy.

(p445) Aside from the novel Emma Bartlett, the song The Little Brown Church in the Vale, skits by Mark Twain and Robert J. Burdette (Hamlin Garland's writings come later), the poems There is no Death and Sherman's March to the Sea, Iowa did virtually nothing in letters (imaginative letters) till the day of Alice French ('Octave Thanet') of Davenport. The publication by the Atlantic Monthly in 1884 of The Bishop's Vagabond, and in 1885 of The Ogre of Ha Ha Bay, both by Miss French, made Iowa something in letters to be reckoned with. This fact Iowa itself has come to realize, for in 1911 the State through its University conferred upon Miss French the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.

236 Harry Downer's History of Davenport and Scott County, Iowa, Vol. I, pp619, 620.

237 A letter on the John Brown Pottawatomie murders by Edward P. Bridgman in The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. VI, pp556 et seq.; see also The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. I, p320.

238 B. F. Gue's John Brown and His Iowa Friends in The Midland Monthly, Vol. VII, pp103 et seq., 267 et seq.; O. G. Villard's John Brown, 1800‑1859, pp410 et seq.

239 Dan E. Clark's Samuel Jordan Kirkwood, pp128‑143.

The downright mendacity of Iowa politics in the late fifties and early sixties is illustrated by the attitude of the Iowa press, particularly on the Missouri slope, toward Kirkwood, Dodge, and Abraham Lincoln.

240 J. R. Rippey's Henry Clay Dean in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. VIII, pp299 et seq.; J. W. Cheney's Glimpses of Henry Clay Dean, a Unique Individual in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. X, pp320 et seq.; George G. Wright's Henry Clay Dean in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. XI, pp481 et seq.; Stiles's Recollections and Sketches of Notable Lawyers and Public Men of Early Iowa, p573; Robeson's Henry Clay Dean in The Palimpsest, Vol. V, pp321 et seq.

241 F. I. Herriott's Iowa and the First Nomination of Abraham Lincoln in the Annals of Iowa (Third Series), Vol. IX, pp45 et seq.

242 Council Bluffs Bugle, July 25, 1860.

Refuge for Iowa if the Union Be Dissolved. — 'Where are we going? How shall Iowa stand? We have a communication headed with this significant interrogatory advocating the connection of Iowa with the Pacific Confederation in the event of a dissolution of the Union. The writer urges this policy with much force, arguing that the interest and safety of Iowa will demand such an alliance for several reasons. First, that the Western Pacific Confederation . . . would have free egress and ingress by the mouth of the Mississippi; secondly, that it would insure a harmony and stability which can never be hoped for in connection with states which have shown themselves exceedingly selfish, dictatorial, rapacious; thirdly, that the sympathy, feeling and community of interests among the Western People would best secure the proper development of their resources by a strict union among themselves. . . . We are inclined to agree with the writer in his main proposition. It is a question which may very soon become (p447)one of deep and vital interest to the people of Iowa'. — Council Bluffs Bugle, December 10, 1860, cited from the Decatur Magnet (Illinois).

243 Dan E. Clark's Samuel Jordan Kirkwood, pp224, 225, 295.

244 J. W. Rich's The Battle of Shiloh in The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, Vol. VII, pp503 et seq.; S. H. M. Byers's Iowa in War Times, Ch. XII.

245 Regarding measures against Sioux Indians a detailed and interesting account may be found in Harvey Ingham's The Northern Border Brigade.

246 Major S. H. M. Byers.

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Thayer's Note:

a The story is told by Plutarch in his Life of Alcibiades, 9; no cleaver, no market place or public venue.

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