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.1Ultimately, the legislature sidestepped the issue of black suffrage, allowingIowa s voters to decide.They flatly rejected any extension of the right to vote.The state s whites-only restriction remained in effect until three years after theCivil War ended.2It is instructive to correlate the various positions on race taken by delegateswith where they and their constituents came from.The two most outspo-ken opponents of black settlement and legal rights in Iowa were GeorgeGillaspy, a 42-year-old farmer born in Kentucky, and the above-mentionedJonathan Hall, a lawyer from upstate New York.Gillaspy represented the 8thDistrict, which encompassed Wapello County.Hall was elected by voters in DesMoines County.Both of these counties are located in the southeastern corner ofIowa near slave enclaves along the Mississippi River in neighboring Missouri.It was to this part of the state that runaways were apt to flee, making their pres-ence a particularly inflammatory issue.(Most delegates who wanted to denyblacks rights in Iowa came from its southern counties.) Two counties repre-sented by leading proponents of black rights were Henry, also in the southeastpart of the state, and Alamakee, in the extreme northeast, bordering Wisconsin.Their spokesmen at the constitutional convention were Rufus L.B.Clarke, alawyer born in Connecticut, and John T.Clark, another attorney, who hadmigrated to Iowa from New York.Despite their differing positions on bills deal-ing with free blacks, these four delegates represented remarkably similar con-stituencies.All four had overwhelming majorities of out-of-state, Northernnatives (between 73.5 and 92.3 percent).In all four districts, the single largestregional bloc consisted of persons born in the butternut states of Illinois, Indi-ana, and Ohio.This proportion ranged from a low of 32.9 percent in AlamakeeCounty to a high of 64.1 percent in Wapello.3 Geographical proximity likelyaccounts for this variation, as Alamakee was more distant from Illinois than theother three counties.1.J.C.Hall and D.W.Price, minority report, Special Committee on Suffrage, Debates, vol.2,651.2.As late as 1860, Sen.James Harlan of Iowa delivered a speech denouncing Democraticpolicies that would fill the virgin Territories [of the Southwest] with negroes, wher-ever negro labor can be made profitable. James C.Harlan, Shall the Territories BeAfricanized? Speech delivered in the U.S.Senate, 4 Jan.1860.www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moa;cc=moa;sid=d7495dbd56b672debfb3e48f77283522;q1=Iowa;rgn=title;view=image;seq=0001;idno=ABJ4929.0001.001231 Race to the FrontierGiven the predominance of Northern natives in these four counties and,in fact, throughout Iowa prior to the Civil War1 there are two possible expla-nations for their generally anti-black posture.Either migrants from the Northwere as prejudiced against blacks as Southerners, or else a large percentage of butternut state natives who moved to Iowa had family roots below the MasonDixon Line and thus held the racially intolerant views common to that region.Existing information about migratory patterns in the Old Northwest stronglysuggests that the latter is more likely.It is well known that many settlers leftOhio, Illinois, and Indiana in the three decades prior to the Civil War.This trendcontinued after the war as well.By 1900, for example, 178,000 natives of theBuckeye State had moved to other states.By far the greatest number of themwent to neighboring Indiana, but Kansas, Michigan, and Iowa also had largenumbers of Ohio natives.In 1860, persons born in the butternut statesaccounted for 53 percent of Kansas s American-born, non-native residents, 42.5percent of this contingent in Iowa, and 13.4 percent in Michigan.While these residents were officially Northerners, they were actually thedescendants of transplanted Southerners.For the exodus from the butternut states was primarily out of the lower tier counties that had been initially beensettled by migrants from the South.One can see this pattern clearly in Ohio.Between 1810 and 1850, the population in 18 southern counties grew by over400,000, but the number of people living in 18 northern counties increased by 1.7million.A decade before the Civil War, there were nearly four times as manypeople living in northern Ohio as in the southern part.But the same outflowoccurred in Indiana and Illinois as well.Why did so many Southern natives andtheir offspring leave these states? A primary reason was the coming of settlersfrom the Northeast.The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the advent ofsteamships on the Great Lakes a few years later spurred their journey west.As aresult, by 1850, New Yorkers constituted the largest single bloc of migrants liv-ing in Illinois, and six of the top ten donor states were situated north of theOhio River.2 New arrivals from free states thickly populated the northern coun-ties of all three butternut states and thus changed these states predominantlySouthern character.This increase in the number of Northern natives residing inOhio helps to explain its somewhat more receptive attitude toward blacks by3.These statistics are derived from The Census Returns of the Different Counties of the State ofIowa for 1856 (Iowa City: Crum & Boye, 1857): http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=moa;cc=moa;sid=cd48a1b4c303bc020aa8ab6aabed8cad;q1=Iowa;rgn=title;view=image;seq=00000001;idno=AFP3813.0001.0011.According to the 1850 federal census, persons born in free states constituted 74.5percent of the non-native residents of Iowa born in the United States.2.Davis, Frontier Illinois, 306.232 VII.The Politics of Exclusionmid-century.Because of this greater Northern presence, families with roots inthe South no longer felt as at home in the Old Northwest as they once had.Butthe growth of the free black population also contributed to their wanderlust.Such an assertion is difficult to corroborate, but the animosity toward blackslater expressed by some migrants from Ohio do lend it credence.During thedebates at the 1857 Iowa constitutional convention, for instance, Amos Harris,an native of the Buckeye State, pointed out that many other whites in Ohiowould gladly migrate to Iowa if the latter adopted anti-black laws.1 At the 1859Republican-dominated Wyandotte convention in Kansas, natives of the butter-nut states accounted for 21 of the 52 attending delegates and therefore boremuch responsibility for upholding constitutional restrictions on the rights ofblack residents
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