Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War

2. The Morning Star

2 The Morning Star I The meaning of the new Kansas-Nebraska Act was not lost on James W. Grimes. The direct-talking Burlington, Iowa, lawyer and active Whig jumped into the 1854 race for governor and became the nominee for the joint Whig–Free-Soil coalition. Winning would not be easy because Iowa’s Democratic Party, with its upholders of slaveholder rights in states where it existed, had controlled state politics since Iowa had achieved statehood and expected it to continue. But the new slavery debate caused by the soon-to-be-passed Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Iowa’s two Democratic senators supported and voted for, gave Grimes and Iowa’s divided Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery partisans their chance. By the end of March opposition to the Democrats coalesced behind Grimes’s candidacy. To open his campaign Grimes issued a pamphlet on April 4 that included a pointed attack on the proposed repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Iowa “would to-day be a slave state,” he declared, “but for the prohibitions of the Missouri Compromise act.” If passed, he wrote, Iowa would face the risk of an antagonistic “slave State on our western border,” and Grimes foresaw “nothing but trouble and darkness in the future. For bounded on two sides by slave States, we shall be intersected with underground railroads, and continually distracted by slave-hunts.”1 The Morning Star . . 11 Fig. 1. Governor James W. Grimes, antislavery leader and Free-State supporter . State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City. Democrats tagged Grimes a foolish ism candidate infatuated by abolitionism and Prohibitionism who was doing his utmost “to bolster up and substantiate if he can, the batch of incongruities ” separating his candidacy’s Whig and Free-Soil coalition partners. In his stop at Des Moines on his stump speech tour, Grimes dwelled “longest and most earnestly” on the KansasNebraska Act. Grimes also aimed his criticism at Iowa’s Demo- 12 . . The Morning Star cratic Congressional delegation, applying “the words TRAITOR and TREASON with as much sangfroid as possible.”2 In particular Grimes claimed the Kansas-Nebraska Act to be part and parcel of the growing nationalization of slavery, which Iowa would never consent to as “the only free child of the Missouri Compromise.”3 Grimes, along with his fellow coalition members, believed that slavery’s expansion must be stopped. As a skilled and imposing figure on the stump, he energetically traveled the state in the ensuing months and denounced the “Nebraska infamy.”4 The growing political energy over the Nebraska issue prompted many localities throughout the state to organize meetings for public discussion. All did not go smoothly, however. At Muscatine on the evening of March 21, townspeople gathered to “make known their views on the Nebraska question.” Though ostensibly a general meeting, a few friends of the Nebraska bill arrived early, quickly organized, rapidly presented resolutions, and moved to a vote. After the vote showed three remained silent and nine in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to allow potential slavery in Nebraska, one committee member rose and commenced a longwinded speech favoring the Nebraska bill. Soon, however, other attendees arrived, and the crowd expanded to some two hundred persons of mainly anti-Nebraska bill sentiment. Upon learning the “game” that “had been played upon them,” they reacted in “wrath and confusion” toward the filibustering speaker. The meeting soon disintegrated and adjourned, after which each side met separately. In other Iowa towns, the gatherings—though spirited—passed strongly worded resolutions against repealing the Missouri Compromise in the Nebraska bill.5 Such meetings revealed anti-Nebraska voters to be excited, and the August election totals confirmed Grimes’s campaign strategy. Grimes won a narrow victory, and in the legislature the Democrats lost their majority, which they would not regain for the next thirty-five years. This development ensured the loss of the Democrats’ two candidates for the U.S. Senate when the leg- The Morning Star . . 13 islature next met to select their successors, and the seats would be in Republican hands for seventy years to come. Democrats lay part of the blame for their decisive losses at the doorstep of religious abolitionists. A Dubuque editor had decried the Congregational Association meeting of Iowa ministers at Davenport on July 7 as “strongly tinctured with politics ” for renouncing “all communion with slave holders” and the “action of the national government in declaring the ancient prohibition of slavery...