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The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Political Change in Iowa j J 5 James Grimes for Governor In May 1854 President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. By superseding the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Purchase lands west and north of Missouri’s southern border, the new law heightened the growing tensions over slavery. Now the question of whether human bondage would be legal in the newly opened western territories took center stage in national and local politics, transforming both in the process.1 In Iowa, the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed like good news to those who thought opening lands to the west would encourage railroad development. Others feared that the Democratic action might result in Nebraska Territory’s becoming another slave state on Iowa’s borders. One who quickly glimpsed the act’s political implications was James Grimes, a prominent Burlington, Iowa, lawyer who had just entered the upcoming race for governor on the Whig ticket (see figure 13). Odds for him at the time seemed poor. Democrats had always controlled Iowa’s elected offices, and they dominated Congress and held the presidency. Nationally, the Whig Party was disintegrating because of the dispute over slavery: its Northern wing generally opposed it, while its Southern wing supported it. Antislavery Whigs were defecting to a variety of third parties, including the Free Soil Party, while proslavery Whigs drifted reluctantly toward the Democrats. Things did not look good for the Whigs in Iowa either. The Whig Party convention that nominated Grimes on Feb- 86 :: chapter five ruary 22, 1854, was deeply divided and faction-ridden. It seemed unlikely that the Iowa Whigs would unite behind their candidate. Although a forceful leader with many supporters in his party, Grimes had a direct manner that had gained him enemies and detractors as well. Two Northern conservative Whig ­ factions—­ the “Silver Grays,” who were fearful of losing control of the party to abolitionists, and the “Cotton Whigs,” who were eager to avoid issues that might alienate party members who sympathized with the­ South—­ refused to support him. Although they admired his natural abilities, they detested his outspoken opposition to slavery. To Grimes’s further consternation, within a month of the convention, three men selected as Whig candidates for other state offices declined to run. Facing his party’s virtual paralysis, Grimes sought an alliance with the Free Soil ­ Party—­ just as other antislavery Whigs were doing throughout the Northern states. A meeting at Crawfordsville, Iowa, on March 28 produced an unstable coalition between the antislavery Whigs who supported Grimes and the Free Soilers, whose political agenda centered on opposing slavery’s extension. Some leading regular Whigs denounced this partnership. And, of course, the Southern and border state settlers who likened antislavery sentiment to abolitionism remained a large proportion of Iowa’s population. What Grimes had going for him was the great question of the ­ day—­ the Nebraska Bill, which came to be called the Kansas-Nebraska Act after Congress passed it two months later. Not one to play it safe, within two weeks of the pact between Grimes’s faction of Whigs and the Free Soilers, Grimes presented an “Address to the People of Iowa” in which he tried to discredit the Democrats.2 Selecting commentary and events from the national scene that reverberated among Iowans, he laid out two lines of attack. First, to erode the Democratic Party’s past advantages, he blamed its leaders for plunging the country into renewed agitation over the expansion of slavery by proposing the Nebraska Bill, which would overturn the Missouri Compromise. If, as the Democrats claimed, no one expected that “slavery will take possession of The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Political Change :: 87 Nebraska,” then, he asked, “why the strenuous effort to repeal the Missouri Compromise?” Iowa would reap vast benefits if it enjoyed a “free, enterprising population on the west,” but, said Grimes, “with a slave state on our western border, I see nothing but trouble and darkness in the future. Bounded on two sides by slave states, we shall be intersected with underground railroads, and continually distracted by slave-hunts. Instead of having a population at the west who will sympathize with us, we shall find their sympathies and interests constantly antagonistic to ours.”3 The battles over fugitives and kidnapping victims in southern Iowa during the 1840s and 1850s demonstrated to many how right Grimes was. Second, to rouse German American hostility toward Democrats, Grimes pointed...

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