Necessary Courage: Iowa's Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery

Introduction. Between Slavery and Freedom

jJ introduction Between Slavery and Freedom In late May 1848 a young man who had recently arrived in Salem, Iowa, hoping to improve his prospects decided it was time to bring his family to join him. But this man, a sturdy twenty-three-yearold named John Walker, faced much greater obstacles than most, for, as he was later described in court records, he was a “mulatto”— part black, part ­ white—­ who had recently run away from the Missouri farm where he had been held in slavery by a man named Ruel Daggs.1 That farm was near Luray in Clark County, twenty miles south of the Iowa ­ border—­ twenty miles south of freedom. The elderly Daggs and his wife worked four hundred acres with the labor of sixteen enslaved workers.2 Among them was Walker’s wife, Mary, a small woman, also twenty-three years old, who worked as a cook and spinner, and their four children: Martha , about eight years old; William, a “well-grown” boy about six; George, about four; and a one-year-old child whose name has been lost to history. John Walker aimed to bring them north to join him in freedom. Since arriving in Salem in April, he had found supporters and made what plans he could. The time to act had come, and so he walked south. Within a few days, John and Mary Walker walked back into Iowa, accompanied by their children and three others. But before they could reach safe haven in Salem, they were recaptured by slavecatchers in the employ of Ruel Daggs. Furious, the town’s antislavery residents, many of them Quakers, crowded around the captors and their victims and succeeded in helping some of the fugitives escape again. The people of Salem also demanded that the slavecatchers prove before a justice of the peace that the runaways 2 :: introduction were in fact enslaved before allowing them to be returned to Missouri . Lacking the proper paperwork and intimidated by the locals’ hostility, the slavecatchers were forced to retreat. Enraged, Daggs organized a posse of his neighbors to invade Salem in search of his missing property. He also appealed to the law, suing those he believed had aided or hidden the runaways. The Walker family’s risky flight toward freedom dramatizes the central themes of this book. Their story demonstrates that the conflict over slavery began long before South Carolina forces attacked the U.S. troops garrisoned at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Nowhere was that conflict more urgent and dangerous than in the Midwest, where slave states and free states lay alongside each other . In Salem in the summer of 1848, Americans from Missouri and Iowa, neighbors living within fifty miles of each other, nearly came to blows over the plight of nine people who were risking their lives to seek freedom. People readily took to the courts to enforce their support for or opposition to slavery. As Iowans grew increasingly opposed to slavery during the 1840s and 1850s and more willing to help those who were escaping from bondage, slaveholding Missourians vigorously defended their property rights. American citizens on both sides of the border between slavery and freedom hid runaways in their barns or captured them and returned them to their owners. This book, the first full-scale history of Iowa’s underground railroad operations, gathers the results of my several years of research while serving as director of a federally funded project of the State Historical Society of Iowa.3 The purpose of the project was to illuminate the historical details of Iowa’s substantial role in the abolition movement and, because of its border with slaveholding Missouri, its status as a battleground in the fight for emancipation . Scholars have interpreted the underground railroad story in various ways, from stressing its great role in bringing on the Civil War and destroying slavery to judging it relatively inconsequential to those battles. Related arguments concern how many or how few slaves actually escaped from slave states and crossed into free states, what effects such escapes had on slaveholders, and how for- Between Slavery and Freedom :: 3 mally organized underground railroad efforts were.4 On one point all agree, however: runaways and those aiding them, especially in border states like Missouri and Iowa, were the reason for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The 1860 census showed that Missouri led every state in fugitive slave losses, with those escaping bondage presumably going to Iowa, Illinois, and...