USA > Iowa > Appanoose County > Past and present of Appanoose County, Iowa : a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement, Vol. I > Part 8
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Advised of the completion of the temporary state house at Des Moines, on the 19th of October following, Governor Grimes issued another proclamation, declaring the city of Des Moines to be the capital of the state of laws.
The removal of the archives and offices was commenced at once and con- tinued through the fall. It was an undertaking of no small magnitude : there was not a mile of railroad to facilitate the work and the season was unusually disagreeable. Rain, snow and other accompaniments increased the difficulties ; and it was not until December that the last of the effects-the safe of the state treasurer, loaded on two large "bob-sleds"-drawn by ten yoke of oxen, was deposited in the new capital. It is not imprudent now, to remark that during this passage over hills and prairies, across rivers, through bottom lands and timber, the safes belonging to the several departments contained large sums of money, mostly individual funds, however. Thus, Iowa City ceased to be the capital of the state, after four territorial legislatures, six state legislatures and three constitutional conventions had held their sessions there. By the exchange. the old capitol at Iowa City became the seat of the university, and except the rooms occupied by the United States district court. passed under the immediate and direct control of the trustees of that institution.
Des Moines was now the permanent seat of government, made -o by the fundamental law of the state, and on the 11th day of January. 1852. the sev- enth general assembly convened at the new capital. The building used for gov- ernmental purposes was purchased in 1864. It soon became inadequate for the purposes for which it was designed and it became apparent that a new. large and permanent state house must be erected. In 1870 the general assembly made an appropriation and provided for the appointment of a board of commissioners to commence the work. The board consisted of Governor Samuel Merrill. ex- officio, president : Grenville M. Dodge. Council Bluffs : James F. Wilson. Fairfield ; James Dawson, Washington; Simon G. Stein, Muscatine: James (. Crosby, Gainsville : Charles Dudley, Agency City ; John N. Dewey. Des Moines : William L. Joy, Sioux City : Alexander R. Fulton, Des Moines. secretary.
The act of 1870 provided that the building should be constructed of the best material and should be fire proof : to be heated and ventilated in the most approved manner; should contain suitable legislative halls, rooms for state of- ficers. the judiciary, library, committees, archives and the collections of the State Agricultural Society, and for all purposes of state government, and should be erected on grounds held by the state for that purpose. The sum first appro- priated was $150,000; and the law provided that no contract should be made, either for constructing or furnishing the building, which should bint the state for larger sums than those at the time appropriated. A design was drawn and plans and specifications furnished by Cochrane & Piquenard. architects, which were accepted by the board, and on the 23d of November. 18;1. the corner stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies. The estimated cost and present value of the capitol is fixed at $2,000,000.
From 1858 to 1860, the Sioux became troublesome in the northwestern part of the state. These warlike Indians made frequent plundering raid- upon the settlers and murdered several families. In 1861, several companies of militia
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were ordered to that portion of the state to hunt down and punish the murderous thieves. No battles were fought, however, for the Indians fled when they decer- tained that systematic and adequate measures had been adopted to protect the settlers.
"The year 1850 marked a new era in the history of lowa. In 1854, the Chi- cago & Rock Island Railroad had been completed to the cast bank of the Missis- sippi river, opposite Davenport. In 1854, the corner stone of a railroad bridge that was to be the first to span the 'Father of Waters,' was laid with appro- priate ceremonies at this point. St. Louis had resolved that the enterprise was unconstitutional and by writs of injunction made an unsuccessful effort to prevent its completion. Twenty years later in her history. St. Louis repented her folly and made atonement for her sin by imitating our example. On the ist day of January. 1850. this railroad was completed to lowa City. In the meantime, two other railroads had reached the cast bank of the Mississippi-one opposite Burlington, and one opposite Dubuque-and these were being extended into the interior of the state. Indeed, four lines of railroad had been projected across the state from the Mississippi to the Missouri, having eastern connections, On the 15th of May, 1850. the congress of the United States passed an act granting to the state, to aid in the construction of railroads, the public lands in alternate sections, six miles on either side of the proposed lines. An extra sessim of the general assembly was called in July of this year, that disposed of the grant to the several companies that proposed to complete these enterprises. The popula- tion of our state at this time had increased to 500,000. Public attention had been called to the necessity of a railroad across the continent. The position of Fowa, in the very heart of the center of the republic. on the route of this great highway across the continent, began to attract attention. Cities and town- sprang up through the state as if by magic. Capital began to pour into the state and had it been employed in developing our vast coal measures and establishing manufactories among us, or if it had been expended in improving our lands, and building houses and barns, it would have been well. But all were in haste to get rich, and the spirit of speenlation ruled the hour.
"In the meantime every effort was made to help the speedy completion of the railroads. Nearly every county and city on the Mississippi, and many in the interior, voted large corporate subscriptions to the stock of the railroad com- panies, and issued their negotiable bonds for the amount." Thu- enormous county and city debts were incurred, the payment of which these municipalities tried to avoid upon the plea that they had exceeded the constitutional limita- tion of their powers. The supreme court of the United States held these bonds to be valid ; and the courts by mandamus compelled the city and county author- ities to levy taxes to pay the judgments. The first railroad across the state was completed to Council Bluffs in January, 1871.
CHAPTER II
NATIVITY OF JOWA'S SETTLERS-NEW YORK, PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO, INDIANA AND ILLINOIS TAKE THE LEADMANY IN THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE STATE FROM KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE.
A valuable and interesting article on the nativity of the people who settled Iowa has been written, after careful research, by F. I. Herriott, professor of economics and political science, Drake University. The author of this sketch relates not only that which he has learned from various sources pertinent to his subject, but gives the opinions of others, who themselves were early on the field and. through their activities and prominence in state affairs and other chan- nels of usefulness were given peculiar opportunities for acquiring data of great value and usefulness in an article of this kind. The details apply to the state in general and to localities in particular, and from the fact that the character of a community is largely known when the nativity of its people is shown makes it apparent to the compiler of this history that a reproduction of Professor Her- riott's brochure will not be amiss and follows:
The lineage of a people, like the genealogy of a family, is not commonly looked upon as a matter of general importance. The wayfaring man is wont to regard it as interesting and worth while only to antiquarians and scholastics. But states or societies, no less than individuals, are the outgrowth of heredity and environment. Life, be it manifest in individual organisms or in social or- ganisms, is a complex or resultant of those two variables. We certainly cannot understand the nature or significance of the customs and institutions of a peo- ple or a state unless we know the character of the environment of that people. But no less true is it that we can neither comprehend the character of a people or the peculiarities of their social development. nor measure the forces that determine public life and action in the present, unless we understand the sources of the streams of influence that unite to make them what they are. . \ people cannot break with its past nor discard inherited political and social ideas, any more than a man can put away his youth and its influences. Social or political life may be greatly modified by the necessities of a new environment but hered- ity and ancestral traditions continue to exert a potent influence.
THE NEW ENGLAND TRADITION
For years the declaration-"Emigrants from New England" settled fowa- has been made by the New York Tribune Almanac, a popular standard book of reference, whose compilers have always maintained a fair reputation for ac-
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citracy m historical matters. The assertion-enlarged often so as to include the descendants of New Englanders who earlier swarmed and pushed out into the valley of the Mohawk and into the petty Jake region of New York, thence southwesterly around the great lakes down into Pennsylvania and thither into the lands out of which were carved the states of the old northwest territory- reflects probably the common belief or tradition of the generality.
Justice Samuel F. Miller, a Kentuckian by birth, was a practicing lawyer in Keokuk from 1850 to 1862, when he was appointed by President Lincoln a member of the federal supreme court. In 1884, in a post-prandial speech be- fore the Tri-State Old Settlers' Association, he said: "The people (of lowa) were brought from New England, interspersed with the vigor of the people of Kentucky and Missouri." In 1896 in an address at the Semi-Centennial of the founding of the state, the late Theodore S. Parvin, who came from Ohio in 1838 as private secretary to Robert Lucas, the first territorial governor of Iowa, and who was ever after an industrious chronicler of the doings of the first set- tlers, declared that the pioneers of lowa "came from New England states, the younger generations directly, the older having migrated at an earlier day, and located for a time in the middle states of that period and there remained long enough to become somewhat westernized. They were from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. There was an element of chivalry, descendants of the old cavaliers of Virginia, some of whom had come through the bloody ground experiences of Kentucky and Tennessee : these were found mostly in the southern portion of the territory."
Here and there we find contrary or divergent opinions. Occasionally we encounter assertions that original New Yorkers or natives of Pennsylvania or emigrants from southern states constituted the important clements in the tides of the western popular movement between 1830 and 1860 that flowed over into and through lowa. But even when speakers and writers recognize that the immigration into Iowa was not entirely from the states of New England they almost always regard such other streams as of secondary importance or as sub- sequent to the inflow of the New Englanders or their westernized descendants. Issuing from this common belief we have the general opinion that the predomin- ant influences determining the character of the social and political life and in- stitutions of lowa have been Puritan in their origin.
In what follows I shall examine briefly the grounds on which this tradition rests. I shall first consider the premises of the belief: second, the social con- ditions and political developments persistent throughout the history of lowa that are inexplicable upon the New England hypothesis; and third, facts that clearly suggest if they do not compel a contrary conclusion respecting the region whence came our predominant pioneer stock.
The New Englander has always been in evidence in lowa and his influence manifest. George Catlin on his journey down the Mississippi in 1835. found that "Jonathan is already here from 'down cast."" In 1834 the name of Jowa's capital city was changed from "Flint Hills" to Burlington, at the behest of John Gray. a son of Vermont. Father Asa Turner, a son of Yale, while on a mission- ary expedition in 1836 found a settlement of New Englanders at Crow Creek in Scott county. Stephen Whicher, himself from the Green Mountains, found "some families of high polish from the city of New York." in Bloomington
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HISTORY OF APPANOOSE COUNTY
( Muscatine). in October, 1838. In all missionary and educational endeavors in Iowa. New Englanders have from the first days played conspicuous parts and have been potent factors in the development of the state. Father Turner preached Congregationali'm in "Rat Row," Keokuk, two years before Rev. Sammel Clarke exhorted the pioneers to embrace Methodism in the "Grove." In 1843 came the "Iowa Band," a little brotherhood of Andover missionaries and preachers, graduates of Amherst, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Harvard, New York City Uni- versity, Union College, the Universities of Vermont and Yale. It may be doubted if any other group of men has exerted a tithe of the beneficial influence upon the life of the state that was exerted by those earnest workers. The two oldest educational institutions in the state owe their inception and establishment to the far-sighted plans and persistent self-sacrifice and promotion of Asa Turner and the lowa Band. It is not extravagant to presume that it was the emulation aroused by those apostles from New England that created the "passion for edu- cation" among the pioneers of Iowa that resulted in the establishment of the fifty academics, colleges and universities between 1838 and 1852. From this fact doubtless lowa came to be known as the "Massachusetts of the west."
The Jection of James W. Grimes, governor of lowa in 1854, and the revolu- tion in the political control of the state which that event signified, first at- tracted the attention of the nation to lowa. Prior to that date lowa was re- garded with but little interest by the people of the northern states. She was looked upon as a solid democratic state and was grouped with Ilinois and Indiana in the alignment of political parties in the contest over the extension of slavery.
Sud !only the horizon changed. The Kansas-Nebraska bill produced a com- plete overturn. Grimes, a pronounced opponent of slavery, a son of New Ilamp- shire, representing the ideas and traditions of the Puritans, was elected chief magistrate of Iowa and James Harlan was sent to the United States senate. . It the conclusion of that critical contest Governor-elect Grimes wrote: "Our south- ern frie : Irive regarded lowa as their northern stronghold. I thank God it is conquerel" In the accomplishment of this political revolution New Englanders energized anl led largely by members of the lowa Band, were conspicuous. if not the preponderante factors. The immigration of population from New Eng- land was then approaching flood tide. "Day by day the endless procession moves on," de bare l Tle Dubu me Reporter. "They come by hundreds and thou-and- from the hills and valleys of New England, bringing with them that same tifiring energy and perseverance that made their native states the admi- ration , i the world." The prompt, firm stand of those pioneers when shocked into con - iousness by the aggressions of the southern leaders, the brilliant lead- ership of time- and Harlan for years thereafter and the long continued suprem- acy of the political party they first led to victory, probably afford us no small part of the explanation of the theory of the supremacy of New England in the settlement of lowa.
Not the least important premise of this view, it may be suspected, is the observation, so frequently made by students of western history in the past three decades that migration from the Atlantic states to the interior and western states has alvar - followed along the parallels of latitude. Illinois is a remarkable illus- tratie- of - tendency. Southern Illinois received its population from Virging and other southern states, while northern Illinois was chiefly settled
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HISTORY OF APPANOOSE COUNTY
from Massachusetts and other New England states. Historians Fiske and Schouler make similar observations about the lines of western popular move- ments. Now if we extend eastward the line of the northern boundary of Iowa, it will pass through or above Glens Falls, near the lower end of Lake George, New York, through White Hall, Vermont, Lacona, New Hampshire, striking the coast near Portland, Maine. Extending a similar line eastward from the southern boundary (disregarding the southeastern deflection made by the Des Moines river ) we should pass just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and come to the coast not far from Sandy llook. If the general conclusion respecting western migration is universally and precisely true, Iowa, it will be observed would naturally have been settled by New Englanders or their westernized descendants in New York, Michigan and Wisconsin, and by those in Indiana, Ohio and Illinois. We have been told recently by George Moore that under the "Ordinance of 1787. New England men and ideas became the dominating forces from the Ohio to Lake Erie" in the settlement of the old northwest territory. A necessary consequence of this fact, if true as alleged, would be that the large emigration to Iowa from Ohio, Indiana and Illinois prior to 1860 was pre- dominantly New England stock, or subject to Puritan ideas and institutions.
The theory that Iowa's pioneers were of Puritan origin, while resting on these strong premises, and others that may be mentioned, breaks down when viewed in the light of common and notorious developments in the political and social life and institutions of the pioneers, many of which are manifest and potent in the life of the state today. New Englanders were conspicuous, energetic and vocal prior to 1840: they were disputatious and vigorous promoters of their ideals of government, law and morals and religion prior to 1860: but neither they nor their kith and kin from New York and Ohio were supreme in Iowa in those days. If they were supreme in numbers, how are we to account for the absence of so much that is distinctly characteristic of the customs and institu- tions of New England in the life of this first free state of the Louisiana Pur- chase ?
In the local government of Michigan and Wisconsin the impress of New England's democratic ideals, her forms and methods of procedure. are to be observed in striking fashion. In Minnesota and the Dakotas the same is largely true. In Illinois the "intense vitality" of the town meeting system of govern- ment so possessed the minds of immigrants from New England that it over- came the prevalent county form of government, and now controls nearly four- fifths of the area of Illinois, although it was not given the right of way until 1848. Here in Iowa, it is not untrue to say that the town meeting and all that it stands for in New England has been conspicuous chiefly by its absence. Governor Robert Lucas urged the adoption of the township as a unit for school purposes. An annual mass meeting was adopted in the scheme therefor. But neither became a vigorous institutional growth. Professor James Macy has shown us that there is strong warrant for doubting the vitality of many of the laws first adopted for the regulation of local affairs in the territory. Not a few of those statutes were enacted pro- forma, not especially in response to in- sistent local demand. Conditions did not compel compact town or communal life. The pioneers depended upon township trustees and school directors. They relied upon county commissioners. Finally it is almost impossible to conceive
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of New Englanders deliberately or even unwittingly adopting the autocratic county judge system of government that prevailed in Iowa from 1851 to 1860. It struck full in the face every tradition of democracy cherished by the people of New England.
If New Englanders settled Iowa, why did the people of the east experience a shock of surprise when the report reached them that the whigs in 1846 had captured the first general assembly under the new state government. "What gain had freedom from the admission of Iowa into the Union," exclaimed Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune of March 29. 1854. "Are Alabama and Mississippi more devoted to the despotic ideas of American pan-slavism . . . ? " Was not his opinion justified when one of our senators could boldly declare in congress that "Iowa is the only free state which never for a moment gave way to the Wilmot Proviso. My colleague voted for every one of the compromise measures, including the fugitive slave law, the late Senator Sturgeon, of Penn- sylvania, and ourselves, being the only three senators from the entire non-slave- holding section of this Union who voted for it." Von Holst ranks lowa as "a veritable hot bed of dough faces." These current assumptions and conditions do not suggest that the state was originally or predominantly settled by emi- grants from the bleak shores and granite hills of New England where love of liberty was ingrained.
The people of New England from the beginning of their history were alert and progressive in the furtherance of schools, both common and collegiate. Among our pioneers there was, as we have seen, great activity in the promotion of "higher" institutions of learning but the movement was largely the result of missionary zeal and work. It was not corporate and communal as was the case of New England. In 1843 Governor John Chambers expressed to the territorial legislature his mortification on realizing "how little interest the impor- tant subject of education excited among us." Notwithstanding the great legal educational reforms secured by the legislatures of 1856 and 1858. the backward condition of Iowa's rural schools in contrast with those in states west, north and cast of us, has been a matter of constant complaint and wonderment.
If one thing more than another characterizes the New Englander it is his respect for Jaw and his resort to the processes of law for the suppression of disorder and violence. Coupled with, if not underlying this marked trait, are his sobriety, his love of peaceful pleasures and his reserve in social life. In the early history of lowa we find much of boisterous carousal in country and town. In 1835 Lieutenant Albert Lea was refused shelter late on a cold night at the only house near the month of the Iowa river which was "occupied by a drinking crowd of men and women." A correspondent to The New York Journal. writing from Dubuque in 1830. declared that "the principal amuse- ment of the people seems to be playing cards. Sundays and all:" while another observer speaks of the "wide and unenviable notoriety" of Dubuque. One may come upon sundry such accounts of pioneer life in various cities along the river and inland. Along with this sort of hilarity and reckless pleasures alien to Puritan character we find gross disregard of law and order frequent in election contests, flagrant corruption and considerable popular practice in Judge Lynch's court. Brutal murders, cattle and horse stealing and counterfeiting appear fre- quently in the calendars in the early days. Outbursts of mob fury and hanging
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bees, the institution of societies of Regulators and Vigilantes form consider- able chapters in the careers of many counties in the state. This lawlessness can hardly be made to square with the traditions that New Englanders brought with them to lowa, traditions that universally govern their conduct as citizens wherever we find them.
Finally we may note a complex or miscellany of facts that have always given more or less color to the history of the state, the significance of which is not commonly discerned. These facts consist of sundry intangible psychic or "spiritual" traits of the pioneers and of their descendants, characteristics often vague and varying and difficult to visualize, but which close observers may clearly perceive.
lowa, by reason of the marked fertility of her soil and favorable climate, has become the garden spot of the continent. Her citizens have attained dis- tinguished success in the accumulation of wealth. The high level of general con- tentment and prosperity of the citizen body has long been a matter of comment and admiration among peoples in neighboring states. The high degree of pop- ular intelligence and education and the prevalence of high standards of private and civic righteousness are no less marked. All these things are admirable and more are incontestible. They no doubt suggest the preponderance of Puritan or northern influences in the life of Iowans. Nevertheless one does not long study the history of lowa, or converse with those familiar with the carly days of the state. or scrutinize our life in recent years before he becomes dimly con- scious of something in the character of large portions of the population that clearly distinguishes them from the New England type of citizen. About the time the writer became interested in the make-up of lowa's pioneer population he asked an early law-maker of the state. (the late Charles Aldrich. founder and curator of the Aldrich collection and the historical department ) if. in his opinion. Iowa was first peopled by emigrants from New England, and his reply was:
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