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| LESLIE SCHWALM |
A Complicated Story
Leslie Schwalm's award winning research challenges many myths about how Iowans viewed slavery and emancipation.
Everyone knows that the Civil War was fought almost exclusively in the South.
Everyone knows that the South was against emancipation and the North was for it.
Everyone knows that Northern opinion on issues of slavery, emancipation, and the status of freed slaves was largely homogeneous.
Everyone is wrong.
"These were national questions, not merely Southern ones," explains Leslie Schwalm, associate professor of history. "And how the upper Midwest answered those questions is a far more complicated story than has been generally acknowledged."
While Iowa may not have been the site of any Civil War military battlefields, Schwalm, by examining many primary source documents, is finding that battles did indeed rage across the state. They were usually battles of words, but occasionally the strong, conflicting opinions erupted into violence.
Despite a constitutional ban on slavery in Iowa, the "peculiar institution" existed in the state before the Civil War. In territorial days, free African Americans were prohibited from even entering Iowa. Though that particular law was changed, Iowa didn't exactly put out the welcome mat for them. African American immigrants, unlike whites, were required to post a $500 bond against "bad behavior."
The most fascinating part of Schwalm's work--supported in part by a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities--centers on rediscovering the "lost" history of some 4,000 African Americans, mostly women and children, relocated to the upper Midwest during the Civil War. They were former slaves who had escaped during the tumult of the war and made their way to Union lines. In a terminology that reveals something of the Northern attitude toward these individuals, they were called "contraband"--the spoils of war. In a single decade, the Hawkeye state's African American population increased fivefold, in large part because of this program of relocation.
Reaction to the refugees was mixed. Some employers viewed the former slaves as a source of cheap labor. Businessmen and farmers met the steamboats coming up the Mississippi River, hiring workers right off the docks--usually at wages far below those paid to whites. Thus, many white workers viewed the newcomers as threats to their own livelihoods.
The conflicting views on emancipation and African Americans among white Iowans of that era are evident in two items that appeared in the same Iowa City newspaper, only a week apart. On April 1, 1863, an Iowa soldier serving in St. Louis wrote that he had a large contingent of "contrabands" and inquired whether farmers back home wanted them shipped northward to help in spring planting. The next week, the paper reported on a large public meeting in Johnson County that produced a resolution stating that "we will resist all schemes . . . to fill our schools and domestic circle with the African race."
"I'm also interested in the question of just how free blacks were, once they arrived in 'free' Iowa," Schwalm says.
From her initial research, Schwalm has found that in addition to being paid lower wages than whites, "contraband" African Americans were often unable to change employers when they wanted. She points to the case of one young man, brought north by Iowa Governor Samuel Kirkwood. The man left Kirkwood's household and sought work at a local hotel. His description of conditions in the governor's mansion sounded more like slavery than employment: unrelenting work, inadequate food, poor clothing. The owner of the hotel sent the young man back to Kirkwood.
Critically examining cherished myths about Heartland attitudes toward slavery and emancipation may make some people uncomfortable. Confronting the past, with all its nuances--positive and negative--may be painful, but it results in a stronger society, Schwalm points out.
"We need to know our past," she says, "in order to build our future on a solid foundation."
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