CHAPTER II

NATIVITY OF IOWA'S SETTLERS-NEW YORK, PENNSYLVANIA, OHIO, INDIANA AND ILLINOIS TAKE THE LEAD-MANY 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 channels 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 Herriott'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 organisms, is a complex or resultant of those two variables. We certainly cannot understand the nature or significance of the customs and institutions of a people 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. A 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 heredity and ancestral traditions continue to exert a potent influence.

THE NEW ENGLAND TRADITION

For years the declaration-"Emigrants from New England" settled Iowahas been made by the New York Tribune Almanac, a popular standard book of reference, whose compilers have always maintained a fair reputation for ac

curacy in 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 lake 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 territoryreflects 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 before the Tri-State Old Settlers' Association, he said: "The people (of Iowa) 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 settlers, declared that the pioneers of Iowa "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 elements in the tides of the western popular movement between 1830 and 1860 that flowed over into and through Iowa. 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 subsequent to the inflow of the New Englanders or their westernized descendants. Issuing from this common belief we have the general opinion that the predominant influences determining the character of the social and political life and institutions of Iowa 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 conditions and political developments persistent throughout the history of Iowa 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 Iowa and his influence manifest. George Catlin on his journey down the Mississippi in 1835, found that "Jonathan is already here from 'down east.'" In 1834 the name of Iowa'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 missionary 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

(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 Congregationalism in "Rat Row," Keokuk, two years before Rev. Samuel 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 University, 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 Iowa Band. It is not extravagant to presume that it was the emulation aroused by those apostles from New England that created the "passion for education" among the pioneers of Iowa that resulted in the establishment of the fifty academies, colleges and universities between 1838 and 1852. From this fact doubtless Iowa came to be known as the "Massachusetts of the west."

The election of James W. Grimes, governor of Iowa in 1854, and the revolution in the political control of the state which that event signified, first attracted the attention of the nation to Iowa. Prior to that date Iowa was regarded with but little interest by the people of the northern states. She was looked upon as a solid democratic state and was grouped with Illinois and Indiana in the alignment of political parties in the contest over the extension of slavery. Suddenly the horizon changed. The Kansas-Nebraska bill produced a complete overturn. Grimes, a pronounced opponent of slavery, a son of New Hampshire, representing the ideas and traditions of the Puritans, was elected chief magistrate of Iowa and James Harlan was sent to the United States senate. At the conclusion of that critical contest Governor-elect Grimes wrote: "Our southern friends have regarded Iowa as their northern stronghold. I thank God it is conquered." In the accomplishment of this political revolution New Englanders energized and led largely by members of the Iowa Band, were conspicuous, if not the preponderant factors. The immigration of population from New England was then approaching flood tide. "Day by day the endless procession moves. on," declared The Dubuque Reporter. "They come by hundreds and thousands from the hills and valleys of New England, bringing with them that same untiring energy and perseverance that made their native states the admiration of the world." The prompt, firm stand of those pioneers when shocked into consciousness by the aggressions of the southern leaders, the brilliant leadership of Grimes and Harlan for years thereafter and the long continued supremacy 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 Iowa.

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 always followed along the parallels of latitude. Illinois is a remarkable illustration of this tendency. Southern Illinois received its population from Virginia and other southern states, while northern Illinois was chiefly settled

from Massachusetts and other New England states. Historians Fiske and Schouler make similar observations about the lines of western popular movements. 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 Hook. 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 predominantly 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 institutions of New England in the life of this first free state of the Louisiana Purchase?

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

In Illinois the "intense vitality" of the town meeting system of government so possessed the minds of immigrants from New England that it overcame the prevalent county form of government, and now controls nearly fourfifths 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 insistent 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