Necessary Courage: Iowa’s Underground Railroad in the Struggle against Slavery by Lowell J. Soike (review)

At the time Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, eighteen of the thirty-three states in the American political union did not allow slavery to exist within their borders. Six of those free states shared a common border with at least one slave state. Of those six, only Iowa was located west of the Mississippi River. Thus, Iowa was strategically positioned to help individuals trying to escape the bonds of slavery in the western region—if residents were willing to break existing laws to aid the fugitives.

As it turns out, some Iowans were up to that challenge prior to the Civil War. Lowell J. Soike has at last told their story, never before examined in a monograph-length work. Thoroughly researched and clearly written, Necessary Courage helps to further our understanding of how and why a small but resolute group of Iowans flaunted laws to help slaves have a chance to attain freedom.

Soike is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the part that Iowa played in the Underground Railroad. A mandate by the Iowa General Assembly in the late 1990s led to the creation of the Iowa Freedom Trail Grant Project, a program designed to help identify the locations in Iowa associated with the Underground Railroad; Soike headed this project, and Necessary Courage came out of his effort. While he found that many of the physical structures from the antebellum period no longer existed, he learned that there was a wealth of written accounts that pertained to Iowa’s role in the Underground Railroad. These sources form the basis of his story.

In Soike’s telling, the Iowans involved in the Underground Railroad had a number of successes in aiding runaway slaves. Many fugitives were rather mundanely shuttled from location to location, but some endeavors involved armed confrontation, and not every escaped slave avoided capture while on Iowa soil. Moreover, Necessary Courage proves that not every Iowan involved in the Underground Railroad was white. Indeed, an African American businessman from Muscatine named Alexander Clark emerges as a hero for his efforts to aid a runaway. Soike also demonstrates that Iowans could indirectly help the Underground Railroad. The story of John Brown is a prime example; Soike points out that Brown spent a long time traveling through Iowa, where he gained financial backing, and in the community of Springdale trained his band for their raid on Harpers Ferry. Soike’s book shows how a wide variety of Iowans helped slaves escape from servitude.

Necessary Courage does suffer from a few minor errors. For example, Lecomp-ton, Kansas, is misspelled, as is Platte County, Missouri. But the book’s merits far outweigh its drawbacks. In an engaging manner, Lowell Soike has brought to life the stories of Iowans who took a stand against what they perceived to be a great injustice and, in the process, became part of one of the most important movements in the Civil War era.