“Men maddened with hate and rage ran through the streets with insulting words ever on their lips. When I bade my husband good morning, I did not know but he would be the first victim of the fury.” (Sarah Parker to her mother, March 1860)
This letter described Grinnell’s first riot (March 13-14, 1860) over the presence of fugitive slaves in the public school. It captured my imagination. I wanted to know who instigated the riot and exactly what happened.
Most Grinnell residents today know that their town was a stop on the Iowa Underground Railroad. I was hungry for facts, so I dived into the local archives.
Members of the local Congregational Church played a large role in this young town (founded in 1854, just 7 years before Fort Sumter). The church required members to oppose slavery and respect the “rights and privileges” of all people, including fugitive slaves.
Today, Grinnell is the home of progressive Grinnell College. All in all, it seemed like an unlikely place for a race riot.
Civil Liberties
I’m a child of the 1960s (granted, from a conservative family). As such, I value the civil liberties of Americans. I respect the right to dissent, that is, to disagree with those in authority. I honor the Grinnell residents who, at risk of heavy fines and jail time, broke the national law. They helped at least 37 fugitive slaves on their way to freedom.
I found hundreds of sources about early Grinnell, from its founding in 1854 through the end of the Civil War. I also studied the history of Poweshiek County. In the process, I discovered some Confederates from Iowa.
Murder of the Marshals
On October 1, 1864, two deputy marshals tried to round up three “draft deserters” in southwest Poweshiek County. Bushwhackers murdered the marshals. Earlier that summer, 50 or so men had formed a local militia, swearing that they wouldn’t submit to a draft. The men called themselves “The Democratic Rangers.” One of those men became an accomplice to the murder of the marshals.
This whole development was news to me, an Illinois native. When I was a kid, my class went down to Springfield, and we walked past a bronze bust of Abe Lincoln’s chest and head. I happily rubbed his now-white nose. (Most Illinoisans have done the same thing.)
I used to think that all Iowans supported the Union war effort and President Lincoln. Then I discovered that wasn’t true.
The murders made me ask, “Did any Iowans go a different route and serve the Confederacy?” That question led me to historian Hubert H. Wubben, author of Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement. Wubben states that two Iowa state legislators served the Confederacy, and so did two sons of Iowa U.S. Senator George Wallace Jones. That’s how I began my study of Confederates from Iowa.
Million-Dollar Question
I soon faced the million-dollar question: Why would men leave a nice state like Iowa and serve the “other side”?
That question led me to study the home front in Iowa during the war. To my surprise, there were violations of civil liberties, and men were arrested and imprisoned without formal charges and without trial.
I learned that Iowans haven’t always agreed. This tradition goes back to the Underground Railroad, and then Confederates from Iowa, and a hundred years after that, the anti-war protestors of the 1960s. Like a scarlet ribbon, dissent marks our history.
Ryan Roenfeld
2 May 2015and also hung, in Glenwood, for treasonous sentiments.
David Connon
2 May 2015Hi, Ryan.
Thanks for commenting. Would you like to share any details about this event?
Ryan Roenfeld
22 Jul 2015Sorry this took so long, I just saw your response. This was the write up I did on the lynching for the Glenwood newspaper’s 150th birthday. It was was May 28, 1865 when they found James Henderson “hanging by the neck to a tree about one half mile from town.” That was surely old news when the next issue of the Opinion appeared on June 3 with the lynching reported on the third page of the four page newspaper. As it was, the “citizens of this place were startled and surprized on the morning of 28th” as “one end of a bed cord” was “formed into a running noose, adjusted about his neck, the other end passed over a limb, and tied to the root of a tree standing near by.”
The Opinion appeared concerned as the “doctrine of ‘mob law,’ if indeed it can ever be satisfactorily justified, must find an abiding place resting on the most extraordinary grounds, surrounded by the most extraordinary circumstances!” Still, “That the world may be able to judge correctly in the present case, we desire briefly to state, so far as we know, the fact and circumstances connected with the affair.”
Henderson “had been living in Glenwood a number of years, engaged in the various callings of saloon keeper, gambler, and loafer” and “belonged to that class of men who desired the final triumph of the rebel flag, often giving vent to the treasonable sentiments he entertained.” As everyone knew, “Last winter, the safe containing the County Treasure of this county, was attempted and came well nigh being opened” with “universal suspicion upon” Henderson. Afterward, “business houses were broken into frequently, and on Friday night before the death of Henderson, a horse was stolen from the stable of Mr. Betts, in this place.” According to the newspaper, for “several months back, Henderson had been loafing about town, sometimes away on short trips to places unknown to the people here” and “he carried on a general thieving and robbing business, the people who knew him best uniformly believed for several years.” He “was a sly, cunning, shrewd man, and so stealthily accomplished his villainy that no one could ever be got to fasten guilt upon him in the Courts of Justice.”
There seemed “universal conviction” that Henderson was “a bad and dangerous man” and “we doubt not those who put him out of the way, possessed evidence of his guilt which convicted him with the recent attempts to rob our county and the stable and drawers of some of our business places in town.” The newspaper maintained that “Who assisted in disposing of Henderson is not known to any except those who did it, so far as we have learned.” The Opinion also reported that on Sunday morning Mrs. Henderson “frantically implicated many of our best citizens, but we learn since that she has acknowledged that she knew nothing about it, and that she regrets having done so, saying that she was not at the time in her right mind.”
That such “a necessity ever arisen demanding such an event, as we record, everyone in the community deeply deplore” and “To execute a man in a civilized community without the judicial sanction of the laws of the land, is indeed an awful thing.” However, “it is done, without being understood as encouraging the spirit which dictated it, it is but just to say that every one feels a relief and burden removed from his heart is known that Henderson is out of the way.”
The “execution” was “the first and only instance of the kind” in the county and “was not the result of an unbridled and infuriated mob moved only by impulse”. Instead, “So quietly and deliberately was the act accomplished, that if Mr. Buker had not happened to pass the spot where Henderson was hanging, while hunting cows, it would perhaps not have been known till late in the day and likely not until the next.” The “Coroner’s inquest was held on the dead body which determined that Henderson came to his death by hanging by the neck” by “persons unknown to the jury.” Henderson’s body was taken to Fairview cemetery in Council Bluffs.
The Opinion questioned information in the Daily Nonpareil concerning the arrest of “the executioners” as that seemed news to the Glenwood newspaper. There was also a letter from Mrs. L. Nuckolls concerning accusations she gave “Mrs. Henderson advice to shoot or burn the persons and property of those persons whom she supposed to have hung her husband”. Mrs. Nuckolls would “take an oath” that she never said that and “neither did I ever advice, her to take revenge in any way” and “never took the life of any man much less rejoice in the death of Lincoln.” It should be noted that Lafayette Nuckolls’ brother Stephen was a well-known Nebraska City slave-owner who once crossed into Iowa to harass and beat free blacks residents of Civil Bend near modern Percival.
Another letter in the Opinion was from P. O. Templeton concerning a man who “came to this town to preach a few weeks since”. Templeton said he recognized him from Gentry County, Missouri in 1861 where he “was known to be disloyal when I left there”. Templeton was then “implicated for making the statement” but none who vouched for the new preacher knew him then. Templeton then quoted a letter from Thomas Grantham from Gentry County who wrote the man “said in Alanthus, ‘Let Missouri secede and the North will never think of coercing her?'” and “I heard him say that it was right and proper for the Southern States to be themselves”. Grantham also claimed the man was “present at the raising of the rebel flag in Alanthus, and was chief manager of the affair”.
In 1865 Glenwood contained 719 white and 9 “colored” residents with a different sort of Civil War in the American West far from Gettysburg but not so far from the guerilla warfare that tore Missouri apart. Those were the days of loyalty oaths, war refugees, and draft dodgers with roving highwaymen and someone tried to dynamite the Fremont County courthouse in Sidney. On the front page of the Opinion was Horace Greeley’s salute to “Our Returning Heroes” and a set of “Rebel Phrases” from the Dubuque Times that defined “Southern Rights” as the “rights to run to Mexico or Cuba, when wearied or unsuccessful in murdering and stealing in the United States; and the right to don petticoats at will without molestation.” That referenced the capture of Jefferson Davis who had borrowed his wife’s shawl only to be ridiculed for surrendering while wearing a dress.
Chairman H. C. Watkins and secretary William Hale called a “Republican Mass Convention” at the courthouse in Glenwood on June 5. Those “requested to be present and participate” were those “who regard treason as a heinous crime, and believe it ought to be punished as such, and who are opposed to the sentiment and men, who assassinated the good man – Abraham Lincoln – and also who favor the restoration of the American Union without a vestige of slavery” to stain the country.
A “specie of caterpillar or army worm” had invaded Glenwood “destroying nearly all vegetation within their reach” and there was an “Official Notice to Emigrants” from General Conner at “Ft. Kearney, N. T.”. General Conner reported wagon trains west “must cross the Platte at Plattsmouth” with no crossing “east of Laramie” and “I have not the troops to escort them on the north side.” News under “Official Intelligence” included a “train of twenty-three wagons” that passed through on their way to Salt Lake City. M. F. Deupree of the 4th Iowa Battery was back on furlough and I. & F. Heinsheimer were selling out to move east. A. P. Martin had “removed his Saddle and Harness Shop to the northwest corner of the Public Square” which still might exist, much modified, at 432 First Street.
The Vigilance Committee also played a role in the Fallon affair reported J. D. Edmundson, a Glenwood lawyer during the war. Fallon Hill was east of town and Fallon Creek still flows through Glenwood Lake Park but Joe Fallon made the mistake of getting drunk and shooting at the American flag flying over the Square. Before it was over he had to kneel and kiss the flag at the courthouse, donate to the wives and children of Union soldiers, and get out of town for good.
In 1867 the Vigilance Committee went up to Council Bluffs to kidnap William and Patrick Lawn, Henderson’s two brother-in-laws. They were dragged south across the county line and killed. That sparked serious consternation over hauling two Union veterans out of a West Broadway hotel to hang them dead. The Lawn brothers were also buried at Fairview cemetery but charges against the supposed perpetrators were eventually dropped. After that “from there on there was little said about the vigilance committee,” according to Mrs. Jessie Wheeler Shipman in 1946.
Richard Lemmers
2 May 2015According to some research I did on the 2nd North-East Missouri Cavalry, a unit organized as part of Colonel John Porter’s bid to try to take that part of Missouri back from the Federals and in which my wife’s great great great grandfather was a member, I discovered that that Confederate regiment had an native of Iowa as its leader. Colonel Cyrus Franklin of the 2nd NE MO CAV, C.S.A., was from Iowa.
David Connon
2 May 2015Hi, Richard.
Thanks for reading my blog and sharing what you found. Yes, Colonel Cyrus Franklin was with the 2nd N.E. Missouri Cavalry (Confederate). Prior to serving the C.S.A., Franklin had been an Iowa state legislator. Some of his peers (who served the Union) found him to be puzzling.
Bruce Allardice
16 Oct 2016For my book “Confederate Colonels” I did considerable research on Col. Cyrus Franklin, which anyone is welcome to. Dave, looking forward to your talk in Chicago!
David Connon
23 Oct 2016Hi, Bruce.
Thank you for reading my blog! I appreciate your research and your insights. I’m looking forward to speaking at the Chicago Civil War Round Table on Friday, November 11.
Donna Haxton
2 May 2015In my family line, my mother’s mother’s family settled in Adel shortly after the state was founded. One of my great-grandfather’s older brothers signed up to fight for the Union as part of the Iowa unit. I believe his name for Charles Lambert. Sometime after Vicksburg he was captured by the Confederates and taken to Andersenville. We have a letter from him in our family papers. It is almost impossible to read. He died a few months later of lung infection. Bob and I visited the camp while our kids were at my parents’ home in AL. We found him and information about his time there which was the same as what our family knew, but when we found his cross, I was overwhelmed with the number of crosses marking the dead Union soldiers. The crosses almost touching, they were side by side, line by line as far as the eye could see, and that was not the only field of crosses.
David Connon
2 May 2015Hi, Donna.
Thanks for reading my blog and sharing that touching family story. Visual symbols, such as the crosses you described, really bring out the enormous cost of the war.
Steve Hanken
2 May 2015I am intrigued as usual, keep this blog going, I want to know more about the riot in Grinnell for sure. I need to get to the library there myself as so many of the “Iowa Band” left letters and materials from there time in the UGRR as did the missionary societies that were instrumental in bring others. Lots of little details that get lost in the manuscripts of history that are meaningful when dealing with the little insightful things of the UGRR. Recently a message was discovered, sent between two operators that had very little to do with anything until you understood “the two volumes, bound in black, being sent” was a message telling the next person what to expect in the next shipment of freedom seekers!
David Connon
2 May 2015Hi, Steve.
Thanks for your kind and thoughtful comments. The Grinnell College Archives, downstairs in Burling Library, are a treasure. I agree that details get lost in manuscripts of history. When I was researching early Grinnell, I wanted to read the letters for myself, and not simply accept someone else’s description or interpretation. It seemed to me that other researchers might have missed something (through no fault of their own), simply by looking for something different than what I was looking for. I liked your example of “the two volumes, bound in black, being sent.”
In case you might be interested, my fullest account of the Grinnell riot is in the Iowa History Journal, Volume 2, Issue No. 5, September/October 2010, pgs. 27-29, 39, “The Underground Railroad had Iowa in Turmoil” (also titled, “Grinnell was among many Iowa towns on Underground Railroad”). http://iowahistoryjournal.com/previous-issues/2010-2/
David Connon
29 Jul 2015Hi, Ryan. Thanks for sharing your write-up for the Glenwood newspaper’s 150th birthday. It has lots of interesting details!