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10. Remembering and Forgetting the Underground Railroad
- University of Iowa Press
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Remembering and Forgetting the Underground Railroad j J 10 In Davenport, four months after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, William H. Hildreth— a founder of what would become East Davenport— turned out of the family home the servant known as Old Aunty. In 1843 he had bought her as a slave and about 1850 moved her from the South to Davenport. There, she had remained a slave, working without wages and ignorant of her rights in this free state. By 1865, as she grew old and feeble, Hildreth saw her as a burden and “told her one day to leave ‘his house and not show her d— —d black face in his kitchen again.’” Too old to earn a living, she faced destitution and hunger in the few years remaining to her.1 Fortunately, she received support from kindhearted Davenport residents, and soon attorney Alfred Sully heard of her plight and “took up her cause.” Sully, a “tall, rather slightly built, nervous, and energetic” twenty-four-year-old who worked for the old law firm of Corbin, Dow, and Browne, charged Hildreth with owing back wages , arguing that Old Aunty should receive “compensation for the whole twenty-two years’ service.” With little choice but to agree, Hildreth also provided his former servant with “a little old house to live in,” and thereafter others also helped to make sure she spent her final years free of privation.2 These generous Davenport residents were not alone in their concern for African Americans after the Civil War ended. In the immediate aftermath of the war, many idealistic antislavery activists in Iowa, particularly the Quakers, turned to relief work among the newly freed people and organized schools for them. In 1866 Isaac T. Gibson of Salem, Iowa, reported that his group had established Remembering and Forgetting the Underground Railroad :: 203 six such schools in Missouri, with nine teachers and 1,357 enrolled students. Some one hundred young Iowa teachers left their Quaker, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist families to work in difficult conditions among formerly enslaved people, helping educate them despite having few textbooks and few or no writing materials.3 As the years went by and the war faded in people’s memories, former abolitionists naturally hoped people would remember the risks taken by both runaways and those who had assisted their escape efforts. In 1872 Ret Clarkson, publisher and editor of the Des Moines Iowa State Register, was already lamenting that “every day the various items and incidents of these historic facts, is rapidly being forgotten.” This “most interesting chapter” of history, Clarkson urged, needed to “be written now while the actors are still living.” It was they who carried the special distilled strength of “human sympathy, Christian sentiments and brave hearts,” they who were the very “champions of the freedom of all men in a period when to be so was not only unpopular but also fraught with danger.” In particular, “the good they did at the expense of personal profit and personal peril should never be lightly estimated.”4 In places such as Henry County, formerly a hotbed of abolitionism , interest in what had gone before persisted. Mount Pleasant organizers brought in the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass on February 28, 1867, for a lecture in Union Hall. At his Friday evening talk before a crowded house, white and black residents alike heard “the Cicero of the negro race” speak upon “the dangers of the Republic.” Though a reporter thought it lacked “the fire of burning eloquence which was a marked characteristic of Douglass in his former days,” even so his speech was “radical to the core,” filled with “thought, logic, sarcasm, and sound statesmanship.” It met with “demonstrations of the most enthusiastic applause from the vast audience.”5 Some seventy miles west of Mount Pleasant in Oskaloosa, people began to talk of bringing together a local reunion of “old line abolitionists .” In December 1868, at Judge Thompson’s office in that town, several people agreed to hold such an event on the afternoon and evening of New Year’s Day 1869. They sent a call out to all “who 204 :: chapter ten were abolitionists prior to the formation of the Republican Party in 1856,” as well as inviting the public to attend. At the well-attended get-together, the two speakers were the Presbyterian minister R. A. McAyael and Methodist pastor L. B. Dennis. Within a few years, abolitionists’ reunions throughout Iowa and Illinois mushroomed...