USA > Iowa > Story County > History of Story County, Iowa; a record of organization, progress and achievement, Volume I > Part 29
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brought back for examination, sent for trial to Cedar Rapids, convicted and sent to the penitentiary. Also in the early morning of January 1, 1864, in the midst of the worst blizzard that the northwest has probably ever known, the court house was burned; and from this event there grew controversies that never entirely died out, while the men concerned were politically active.
The politics of this time seems to have been really of less moment in a local sense than the politics of almost any other time in the county. Doubt- less, the reason for this is that so large a proportion of the men who might naturally have been expected to engage in politics were absent with the army ; and, at the same time, those who remained at home were sufficiently interested in the war so that they were able to reconcile and compromise their differences over matters at home. By this, it is not to be understood that there was no politics; for the line of division between the democratic and republican parties was probably at this time deeper and better defined than at any other time; but the controversies were over the state of the Union, and the suppression of the rebellion, and the status of the negro, rather than over local concerns. Of the bitterness of this national issue, it is quite impossible for one of the later generation to have any just con- ception ; but the controversy was of such order that, years afterwards, it was apparent to one who came as a youth into the community that the old- timers who had been strong for the Union still had and wanted very little if anything to do with the old-timers whom they rated as "copperheads," or who, as they themselves understood it, had been desiring the restora- tion of the Union as it was.
Expressive of this controversy was the publication of the paper known as the Nevada Democrat. This paper was published by E. B. Potter, who at the time was the leading democrat of the county, the manifest purpose of the publication being, not to secure a revenue from it, but to have an avenue for the public expression of political opinions. This paper was published on the lot where the compiler of this history has lived for many years; the fact somewhat suggesting that different sorts of politics may, at different times, come from the same quarter. We do not know that any copy of this paper is still in existence, and its republican contemporary managed to get along without quoting from it extensively or referring to it very much. Hearsay testimony, however, is all to the effect that it was conducted with both vigor and frankness, whether its sentiment, in the view of historical events, could be justly recorded as patriotic or not. Not for the purpose of reviving bitterness, but because the controversy is a part of the history of the county, we will quote on this subject from the letter elsewhere mentioned, of Captain George Child, written from Ft. Pillow. Tennessee, in March, 1863, to W. G. Allen of Nevada. Captain Child expressed the soldier view of the matter, and he said: "You ask me what I think of the self-trumpeter of the Nevada Democrat. Well, I have this to say : It is one of the most contemptible sheets I ever saw, and I think the rebels that are in arms are gentlemen in comparison with the editor
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of such a paper. I have watched it carefully, and I have yet to see one word in favor of the Union. Do the democrats endorse that paper as a general thing? Bill McGuire, when he was sending that letter purporting to be from a soldier from the Second Iowa, said if he had been the editor, he would not have published such a letter as he did." The quarrel is over and the Union is preserved, but such bits as this are necessary if we are to understand what was in the minds of people who lived in the time of the Civil war.
The most strenuous politics of the Civil war period seems to have per- tained to choice of members of the General Assembly. In 1861, Thomas C. McCall, afterwards repeatedly a member of the General Assembly from Story County, was the republican nomince for representative, and was clected after a vigorous contest over issues of the war, the majority being much increased from the dozen or so of two years before. At this time Col. Scott was a hold-over member of the senate, and the district not be- ing regarded as safely republican, because of the democratic proclivities of Boone County and because of the absence of soldiers in the war; it was the republican suggestion that he continue to hold his senatorship, not- withstanding his service in the field at the same time as lieutenant colonel of the Third lowa Infantry. In the ultimate, however, it was held by the state senate that such duplicate service was not allowable, and the sena- torial seat was declared vacant. Accordingly a special election was called in mid-winter of 1862, the candidates being John L. Dana of Nevada, former representative, and E. B. Potter before mentioned. It was a poor time for getting out the vote, but in this matter, the democrats were the more active, and Potter was elected. The republicans, however, retained a working majority in the state senate, and it does not appear that this local democratic success had any effect further than to accentuate the local quarrels before suggested.
In the next legislative election, that of 1863. the republicans elected both senator and representative for this district. The senator was H. C. Henderson of Marshalltown, afterwards for a number of years district judge in this judicial district. The nominating convention was held at Nevada, the district being composed of Marshall, Story and Boone Coun- ties. Boone and Marshall Counties both had candidates, and, between them, Story chose the Marshall candidate, who was accordingly nominated and elected. In this same year, Geo. M. Maxwell of Cambridge came to the fore as the representative of Story County. Mr. Maxwell was a pioneer of notable ability and force. Ile was a fluent speaker and a very effective campaign debater. Prior to the war, he had been a very keen spokesman of the democrat party, and in April, 1858, he had, upon the nomination of that party, been elected the first county superintendent of schools. The outbreak of the war caused a very considerable break in the democratic party ; and while some democrats, with the views of Mr. Potter and others. continned with increasing bitterness their opposition to the Lincoln admin-
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NEVADA CEMETERY
NEVADA CEMETERY
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istration and policies, yet many others like Mr. Maxwell, followed Logan and other conspicuous antebellum democrats into the republican organiza- tion, and gave their support to the prosecution of the war to the fullest possible extent. Such democrats in that time found most cordial welcome in the republican party, and the spirit of this welcome was locally manifest in the early nomination of Mr. Maxwell as representative in the General Assembly. Story County had at this time become entitled to elect a re- presentative by itself, its last joint representative having been Rosenkrans of Hamilton County, who was elected in 1859, and Mr. McCall having been in 1861 the first representative of this county alone. McCall had in the meantime gone into the army as quartermaster of the 32d Infantry Regi- ment, and it thus came about that the succession fell easily to Mr. Max- well. Mr. Maxwell proved to be a very capable representative, and he not only upheld the policy of raising troops and spending money to put down the rebellion, but he also did much to promote the success of the supremely important local enterprise, to-wit: the construction of the Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad.
Possibly the most interesting political incident of this period, which is not to be regarded as important, pertained to the efforts of his friends to get D. P. Ballard of Howard township into county office. Mr. Ballard was a very bright young man, a son of Dr. Moses Ballard of Howard town- ship, a school teacher and lawyer and one possessed of many qualities that ought to have gotten him along well in the world. In 1858 he had been the republican nominee for county clerk, but had been beaten by 20 votes, the county not yet having turned republican. Early in the first year of the war, he had been elected county superintendent, but in a short time he resigned to go to the war as first lieutenant of Company A of the 23d Iowa, in which company he later became captain. His popularity at home increased with his service in the field, and in 1864 he was again nominated for county clerk. Following this nomination, E. G. Day, who had been holding the office, resigned to take a position with Capt. McCall in the quartermaster's department, and John M. Brainard, then editor of the Story County Ægis (now the Representative) was appointed to the place. After- wards Captain Ballard wrote home indicating that he would not be able to get out of the army to accept the position, and the republican convention was re-convened to make a new nomination. In the meantime, however, some other advice was received, and the convention confirmed the previous nomination of Ballard. Ballard was accordingly elected, but when in the following January the time came for qualifying for the office, he was still in the field and unable to get his resignation as captain accepted ; so a new vacancy was declared and Mr. Brainard again appointed. In the summer of 1865, a new nomination for the vacancy was to be made; but in the meantime the boys had come home from the war, and by almost common consent. the nomination was given to a young veteran, whose qualifications were undoubted and whose record excited much admiration, and thus it Vol. 1-17
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was that J. A. Fitchpatrick entered upon his long period of county service. while the efforts of Ballard's friends to get him into the court house were finally remitted.
WAR-TIME NEWSPAPERS.
Concerning the newspapers in this period of the war, mention has been made of the Nevada Democrat, but that paper was not very long continued. With this exception. the one paper in the county was the original paper which had been started early in 1857 by R. R. Thrall as the Story County Ad- vocate, and which he in 1862 had sold to George Schoonover. It was the fashion in those days apparently that newspaper men when they bought a paper, which was something of frequent occurrence among them, for the reason that they seem to have bought and sold quite readily. to change the name of the paper. "Advocate" had been a good name to start with, but it was by no means spirited enough for so enthusiastic an upholder of the war as was Mr. Schoonover, who therefore mixed both political and military affairs in the name of "Republican Reveille." In November, 1863, Schoonover in turn sold to John M. Brainard, whose choice for a name for the paper proved to be "ÆEgis." Prior to this latter transfer, the files of the paper for war time are very imperfect.
Schoonover, after retiring from the paper went into the army. returned home in broken health, was elected county recorder and died within three months afterwards. Thrall went to Kansas, and was not much heard from in this part of the country afterwards. He appears to have stayed out of the newspaper business when he was out, and to have gone to farming under conditions that were hard. About the only further knowl- edge of a definite order that we have of him is contained in a letter of his, dated at Elizabethtown, Anderson County, Kansas, June 10. 1860, in which letter he wrote MeCall and Thompson of Nevada that "Southern Kansas did not raise enought to bread its inhabitants last season. and nearly everyone in buying corn and flour, wagoned from the Missouri river. Corn is very scarce at $1.50 per bushel. Corn is used here for bread in about the same proportion that wheat is in lowa. How would you like to live on the change? I am getting used to it. The drouth was the cause of the failure. I rather think that there is a failure on 9 10 of the farms two years out of three here in Kansas. Where I live, we have had better hick than some other neighborhoods, judging from the way they come and beg for corn. I have to buy my corn with the rest. Stock raising pays here. Money will readily bring 20% interest. I have known parties to fail to get it at above rate that could give good security for the investment, with interest payable every six months."
Mr. Brainard still lives at Boone, where for many years, he published the Boone Standard, and is now curator of the Ericson library. So far as we know or have any reason to believe, he is the only newspaper man who ever undertook to call a newspaper by the name of " Egis." Hle still
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keeps in touch with the paper which he once published, and once, in later years, when the origin of the name came up for information and inquiry, he furnished the following explanation: "Sec Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Egis-The shield of Jupiter, made by Vulcan, was so called and sympolizes divine protection. The shield of Minerva was called an Ægis ; also Jupiter was covered with the skin of the goat, Amal- thaea, and the Greek for goat is in the genitive case, Aigos. The Ægis made by Vulcan was of brass. I throw my ÆEgis over you, I give you my protection. It was war times, and something military was considered de- sirable, hence the name of the paper. - John M. Brainard." Outside of the employment of the word by Mr. Brainard, the one familiar use of it is by Langdon Drake in his apostrophe to the American Flag, wherein, after he had had Freedom Personified, "Tearing the Azure Robe of Night : Set- ting the Stars of Glory there, and Striping the pure Celestial Light with Streakings of the Morning Light," he relates as to Freedom further "Then from his mansion in the sun, She called her ÆEgis bearer down, And gave into his trusty hand, This Banner of a Chosen Land."
The Ægis, under Mr. Brainard was all right on war questions and other matters but the troubles he appears to have had must have been serious. In one place, it is recorded that the Ægis was made the official paper for the publication of the board of supervisors for the compensation of $75 for the year, which does not appear like very large compensation. Again in the fall of 1864, he had an attack of typhoid fever, and after he, as a sick man, had struggled with the paper for a while, and the boys in the office had struggled with it still further, it was suspended for about two months, until the editor was again really able to take charge. All of this time it is evident that the fluctuations in the cost of print paper and the general difficulty of making collections made serious trouble. The price of the paper fluctuated with the general conditions of the market from $2 to $3 per year; and when the financial situation became especially strennous, it was announced that the paper would not be sent excepting to subscribers who should have paid in advance. Along about the end of the war, also there developed, what is among a good many newspaper men, a standing proposition, to-wit: a movement to take the tariff off of print paper. The Chicago Tribune then, as now, was an apostle of this method of tariff adjustment, but somehow or other it does not appear that the adjustment was ever made in such a way as to make easy the matter of publishing newspapers. Of the general conditions of things in Story County in war time, and of the circumstance of his coming here, with some of the more significant incidents, Mr. Brainard has, at the solicitation of the editor, furnished the following brief review :
"At the outbreak of the Civil war in 1861, I had invested the profits of two tax-lists, received the year before, in a little stock of merchandise at Clear Lake, Cerro Gordo County, and was getting along swimmingly. With the firing on Sumter, the men of that community arose like the grain-field
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before the winds, as they did all over the land, and the legislature met and passed an act forbidding suits for collection against the volunteers. So it was only a matter of time until the sheriff took possession of my stock ! As I had never refused goods to any family of a soldier, and as but few of them were able to pay, I was out of business in less than two years. In the early autumn of 1863 I had found a chance to earn a living by the purchase of Mr. George Schoonover's Nevada 'Reveille' and moving down from Clear Lake, I took up its publication in 'The Alderman Block.'
"The county officers then were E. G. Day, clerk of the court and of the board of supervisors; T. J. Ross, county treasurer and recorder; L. Q. Hoggatt, sheriff; E. C. Evans, county judge; and a board of supervisors composed of one member from each of the eleven townships in Story County.
"The wooden court house, standing where now is the Lockridge home- stead, burned down on the night of December 31, 1863, and what furniture and records escaped the flames were removed to the room in the Alderman block adjoining the printing office, until such time as the burned building could be replaced, which was during the ensuing summer season. In the spring or early summer of 1864, Capt. T. C. McCall. quartermaster of Col. John Scott's Thirty-second regiment, asked Mr. Day to come to the front as his assistant and the county board insisted that I assume his duties at home. This I did reluctantly ; but the position brought me into frequent contact with the people of Story County. One of my duties was the dis- tribution of the money raised for the assistance of the wives and children of soldiers at the front-'War Widows' was the popular term for them. though in fact but few of them were widows. Taxes were payable twice a year, and I presume the strict application of the law would have been to turn over the same as soon as reported 'collected.' But it was soon discovered that such payments were almost invariably expended and then for the ensuing six months very often 'the wolf was at the door.' So. Treasurer Ross and myself arranged a program by which the semi-annual collections were doled out each month, with a reservation for a larger amount in the fall, when the children would need new shoes, school books and other articles incident to the coming cold season. That arrangement was somewhat nullified by the women giving orders to the merchants, and resulting in bare toes when the mother was unable to resist the temptation of 'crimson calico.' This was met at the court house by 'an order in council,' refusing to recognize such drafts against the treasury, and after- wards the dealer found he must carry the same until the woman saw fit to liquidate her debt, which she would usually take ample time to do. All such decisions at the court house may not have had the warrant of the statutes, but they saved a great deal of suffering.
"The railway reached Nevada in 1864, it being the practice then to build only some thirty miles each season-in 1865 it reached Boone and the next year Jefferson. In that year I made my first trip upon a railway
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in Iowa, going to visit my parents at Beloit, Wis. The delight of skim- ming over the country in a few hours, was in deep contrast with the old days of the lumbering stage-coach or the mud-wagon. In this kaleidescope I recall vividly the scenes along the way: women driving the plow or the reaper, or binding the grain. Hard work, but it was one of their many contributions to the work of carrying on the war, and eventually putting down the rebellion. I met last summer, one of those Story County women at the college celebration on the campus near Ames, and I reverently lifted my hat to her in memory of the old struggles and the old cheerfulness.
"We shall never know the unwritten work of these loyal, glorious women ! How they wrote encouraging letters to their husbands, brothers, sweet- hearts at the front. The moral value of such encouragement will never be fully known and can only be imagined. All the older people recall (and the younger ones can read it in history,) how often the Union armies met disaster in the first battles of the great war. But their wives at home, though cast down, never became despondent and the streams of encourage- ment by letter did not cease. Let me recall a frequent scene. At Clear Lake the mail came from Cedar Falls, at first semi-weekly, afterwards daily. The postoffice was at 'the store,' and the mail route extended some eighteen miles farther towards the north, and was carried by team. One daily paper, the Dubuque Times, went to a frontier printing office north of us, and while the mail was being 'changed' I would draw the paper from its wrapper, and running a practiced eye over the headings, I was able to cull the cream of the news. All the women, and many of the men, gathered in to get the news. When there had been a battle I would read the names of the fallen, and often a poor woman, with her little ones clinging to her skirts, would sink to the floor in moaning and tears, when the loved one was so listed !
"Too often our armies were worsted ; but not always. In Nevada, when the news of the capture of Richmond came, business was suspended. All the store boxes not under lock and key were gathered on the South square, and the night was spent in rejoicing. In company with Parson Reid, I watched it until 'long after the wee, sma' hours,' and it is betraying no secrets to say that very few of the citizens failed to 'quaff a bumper' to the boys in blue and the final success of the war. I remarked to my com- panion that 'the boys were getting pretty full.' but he was in sympathy with the occasion and replied that 'There was a suspension of the rules by common consent !' I can yet recall some of 'the rejoicers,' but it would be invidious to mention them. The North and South sides' were a bone of contention for some time. The first business portion of Nevada was along the north street on the South square, with an overflow of the Mike Ross hotel and the Sinclair store, respectively, at the west and east ends of the street. Finally, after the arrival of the railway, the Welton house was moved to the north side, then the printing office, Briggs built the first
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modern store room for his drugs, and soon there was a race for who would be in the swim. Some little feeling appeared, but soon all were glad.
"By the joint efforts of J. L. Dana, who secured the purchase of the lands for the Agricultural college, James Hawthorne and John A. Hull, who got the necessary appropriations in the legislature. that magnificent enter- prise, the greatest in the state as I believe, was made permanent. And yet there is one incident which has never been published, in connection with the college. After the foundations of the main building were some two feet above ground the war came on, and the energies of the state were directed to the raising and equipment of troops, and the college walls stood still. I was at the time clerk of the board of supervisors, and one day in April, during their session, Mr. Dana came to me and said that unless the $10,000 in Story County bonds in aid of the college were re- newed by act of the supervisors, they would be uncollectable because the work had not progressed according to contract when the bonds were voted, and would I contrive to have such extension made by the board. I accord- ingly prepared a resolution in writing, making such extension but withheld it for a fitting opportunity. When the more important business had been completed, along in the afternoon. the members were preparing to ad- journ, some were putting on their coats, and corn-planting weather was beckoning them through the windows, and the question was asked, 'Is that all. Mr. Clerk?' and the reply was, 'yes;' but before any one had left the room, I cried: 'Hold on-one little thing more; there is a small formality in connection with the college bonds which the authorities would like to have made,' and drawing my slip from the desk rapidly, hurried over its text. Some one asked: 'Is it all right, Mr. Clerk?' and received an affirma- tive, of course. They voted it without further examination and saved the college to Story County. A legislature would convene in the fall; the farmers were in danger of thinking that the state would not desert the college location ; but there was danger of some other county discovering the situation, tendering payment for the work done and despoiling Story of her proudest monument.
"J. M. B."
Along about this time, "Linkensale," who was a popular writer in this part of the country, had apparently come up from Des Moines to Nevada for the purpose of taking the cars to go to Washington, and he wrote, to the lowa State Register. of Nevada as follows: "Nevada is also a good place, and is remarkable for its handsome women, of which elegant objects I saw more during my brief stay of four hours than I ever saw in a town of its size during the whole course of my life. Brainard gets up a fine Union paper. Col. John Scott was busy on a fine new house. Hoggatt was sky-larking around as usual, and the republicans on the qui vive generally. It is a first rate town to go to and will be a good deal better after a year or two."
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