Iowa's Forgotten General: Matthew Mark Trumbull and the Civil War

Chapter 3. Iowa

24 Chapter 3 Iowa The “free soil of the western prairies” meant Iowa. Trumbull, Christiana, and Matthew Jr. were one of many families who crossed the Mississippi River by ferryboat and found themselves in “the beautiful land.” Iowa was a young state, admitted to the Union in 1846, a pioneer state where an ambitious man could make his mark. By the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Iowa was a state that was off limits to slavery. Railroads had not yet made their way to Iowa so Trumbull could not get work at his wheelbarrow trade. However, he managed to get a job in a brickyard near Cedar Rapids. He also continued to pursue his ambition to be a lawyer. He again sought out a friendly lawyer who loaned him books and gave him serious training, including regular examinations. Iowa 25 Brick making was a seasonal job that ended with the first frost, and Trumbull found himself out of work again. He then turned to his teaching experience and he secured a winter position teaching school. During the winter of 1852-1853 he also studied seriously to pass the Iowa bar. At the same time Trumbull continued to teach himself literature, math, and grammar so that he could better teach his students. That spring (1853) he was admitted to the Iowa bar, but the exam wasn’t easy. Trumbull wrote that it was “. . .an unusually severe examination, caused by prejudice of the bar against the admission of a brick-yard laborer.”1 Lawyer or not, he still had a family to support and Trumbull was forced to go back to work in the brickyard: I was great sport for the other fellows in the brick-yard, and they always called me “counselor.” With grave pleasantry the boss would say: “Will the learned counsel on the other side bring more clay?”…I enjoyed this banter more than they did because it was based on fact, and was a prophecy of better times for me.2 He worked long enough at the brickyard to save money to purchase the needed books for his legal library and to move to another part of the state because “…I well knew it would be useless to open a law office among people who had seen me working in a brick-yard.”3 In the fall of 1853, Trumbull and his family found their Iowa home in the town of Clarksville, the newly established county seat of Butler County near the Cedar and Shell Rock Rivers in Northeast Iowa. The town was named for the Clark family . Thomas Clark had built one of the first cabins in the area, and Abner Clark had opened the first dry goods store. The town was platted in August 1853 and consisted of twenty-three blocks, not including the county courthouse blocks, with a new courthouse building and city square. There was a post office, new stores, a livery stable, and a dam and race that brought water to a mill. The town seemed ready to become the key trading center in the upper Cedar Valley. Trumbull and his family took a house on South Main Street and he opened the county’s first law office.4 In the early summer of 1854 the towns in the upper Cedar Valley received reports that Indians were on the warpath. Northeast Iowa was thrown into a panic. Trumbull and the rest of the pioneers were eastern people who had been brought up on stories of the deadly warriors of the prairies and they took the reports very seriously. (Such fears were not totally unfounded. Iowa was on the frontier and occasional violent skirmishes occurred between Indians and the settlers; the Spirit Lake Massacre happened just three years later.) Hundreds of people from Butler and Bremer Counties fled south to the town of Cedar Falls, or even as far down the valley as Cedar Rapids. Trumbull took his family to Cedar Falls but refused to go any further. Abner Eads, superintendent of public instruction for Iowa and a veteran of the Mexican War, happened to be visiting Cedar Falls at the time. When the town filled Iowa’s Forgotten General 26 up with refugees, he immediately called for volunteers to march back up the valley and rescue the settlers who did not get away. One of the first volunteers was Matthew M. Trumbull, eager to get back to Clarksville. Eads...